Canadian musical theatre star Caissie Levy shines on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt

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Caissie Levy has been a musical theatre star on Broadway for over a decade now – passing through iconic roles such as Fantine and Elphaba, reinventing Elsa for the stage in Frozen, and, most recently, getting critical plaudits for her turn as Rose in the 2021 revival of Caroline, or Change.

This fall, however, the actor raised in Hamilton has been acting in her first “straight play” on the Great White Way: Leopoldstadt by the great British playwright Tom Stoppard. She plays Eva Merz Jakobovicz, who ages from her 30s to her 70s over the course of the drama about a Jewish family living amid the resurgence of antisemitism in Vienna in the decades leading up to the Holocaust.

Levy, who recently became a dual Canadian-American citizen, spoke to The Globe and Mail’s theatre critic, J. Kelly Nestruck, from New York – where the North American premiere of Leopoldstadt recently extended its run to July.

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This is your eighth Broadway role, but your first in a straight play. And it’s Stoppard!

Growing up in Hamilton, I assumed I would end up in plays and sing on the side. So to have my career be predominantly in musical theatre, which I love and where I feel very much at home, I’ve always kept an eye on what’s happening in the play world. Last summer, I was doing a little off-Broadway musical called The Bedwetter that Sarah Silverman had written, and as I was in rehearsal for it, this audition came in. I just instantly felt like, “Oh, this is an incredible opportunity.”

Were you a Tom Stoppard fan?

I was definitely very familiar with his work and had studied it in school, but I’ve never really thought that I would end up in one of his plays. So it was a huge honour and pretty scary, frankly, when I got cast. But I get to be a student again, I get to learn.

What was it like to meet him? I imagine I would be kind of nervous. Actually, come to think of it, I did meet him once, was extremely nervous and said something dumb.

Yeah, we all were worried about the same thing. He didn’t come in until our last week in the rehearsal room – and he was nothing short of incredible. He met all 38 of us, shook our hands, looked us in the eye, told us how grateful he is that we are part of his project. He was just incredibly warm throughout the whole tech process and previews – out in the house watching the show, and having a cigarette in the alleyway as we were coming in and leaving the theatre, thanking us and wishing us well.

Stoppard discovered his Jewish roots – or started to understand the full extent of them – later in his life, inspiring this play. For you, being Jewish was a big part of your life growing up. Lately it seems you are playing more characters who are Jewish themselves: Eva, Rose in Caroline or Change, your character in The Bedwetter.

That’s been a recent development in my career. I’ve always been a very proud Jew, but it never really found its way into my work. Really, with Caroline, or Change, that was the shift – and it was one of the best theatrical experiences in my career by far. Then, you know, the way work begets work in anyone’s career, people see you in something and think, “Oh, she can do that.”

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There’s constantly that cultural conversation about acting – and how much you bring yourself to the stage and how much you’re turning into someone else.

Representation matters across the board for so many different minorities and ethnicities. It’s really great when people can tell their own stories. I think Jews have fallen in the cracks of that, where sometimes it feels like it’s not necessary to have a Jew playing a Jew – and then other times it does, for me. Like for Rose in Caroline, or Change, we’re lighting the menorah on stage with prayers. I think you just bring so much of who you are and who your ancestors were to the role. Again, in Leopoldstadt, we’re dealing with these generations of this family being persecuted and asking themselves these questions that are the same questions a lot are asking themselves now: Where do we belong? Are we accepted? Do we assimilate? Do we need a homeland? So I think having a cast of predominantly Jewish actors telling this Jewish story is incredibly effective.

Has antisemitism been something that has affected your career at all in any way?

I don’t think directly. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of micro-aggressions throughout – and some more overt ones as well. I’m used to being the only Jew in the room before this experience. But I’ve been incredibly fortunate with the type of roles I get to play and, being a Jewish actor, not having any limitations that I can see.

You’ve recently obtained American citizenship. Why now?

It was time to renew my green card, and now that I have children, it felt like the right time to do it. I started the process before the election and so I was hoping to be able to vote against Trump – but my citizenship did not come through in that time. Because of COVID, everything got slowed down. But then it was really beautiful because the day that I was sworn in as an American citizen was the first day of Biden’s presidency, and that was incredibly moving.

You come up to Canada regularly to see family – and for concerts. Have you explored doing something longer up here?

The only time I worked in Canada was when I did the Toronto sit-down of Hairspray in 2004, which was my second job. When I was in high school, I had dreams of being on Broadway, dreams of being at the Stratford Festival, dreams of being at Shaw Festival. It would be really meaningful to come back and work on something at home.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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