‘ Merrily We Roll Along’ Star Krystal Joy Brown on Seeing Herself in Gussie

Now in her sixth Broadway production, the actor discusses her role in this season's must- see show.

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You’ve Seen Her: On Broadway as Eliza in “Hamilton” and Diana Ross in “Motown: The Musical.”

Currently: Starring as Gussie Carnegie in “Merrily We Roll Along,” the muchcelebrated rendition of the Sondheim classic starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliff and Lindsay Mendez.

“We're bringing a new audience to the Sondheim piece that is getting the love that it deserves,” Brown says of the production, which in its first week this fall broke the house record at the Hudson Theater, and has continued to be the must-see show of the season.

Broadway Dreams: “I was always obsessed with musical theater,” says Brown, a Washington, D.C., native.

“My sister and I would listen to every soundtrack that would come out, and we watched Disney movies on repeat, and I was one of those theater kids that did all the shows. When I heard ‘Rent,' I was like, ‘oh my gosh.' There was a tour that was coming around to Virginia and I saw the show and I, for the first time, really saw people who looked like me. I saw New

York being depicted, which was my dream city. I was like ‘there's gay people, there's lesbians, there's drag people. There's people who are living this extremely exuberant life and feeling these levels of depth and desperate to live.' That was so exciting to me. And I didn't even know that theater could have that level of depth.”

Gussie: Brown has played Gussie since the show's New York Theater Workshop run, and immediately got her on a deep level when reading it for the first time.

“I had been in five Broadway shows, and in the script, she's like, ‘I've been in five Broadway shows. Success is not happening fast enough. I'm inches from the top.'

She says all of these very, very vulnerable things. And I was like, 'these are all feelings and thoughts that I have felt and that I have experienced and that I've mulled over or been currently reconciling with myself.' So it was just like, OK, this is a moment to be extremely honest.

“That's the hard part about Gussie and about all these people is that they are the best and worst of us. We're really being humans on stage,” Brown continues. “It's not ‘look at these shiny happy people.' It's not that at all. It's ‘look at these deeply flawed people who are dealing with a lot.' And so bringing that vulnerability and that honesty to my own experience of, yes, having been in five Broadway shows and feeling like I've reached a certain level of success, but I feel like I want to dig in more, and I want to be around people who challenge me and who can make me level up by me showing up in a more present way felt like I could understand her ambition in that way. I could understand her desires in that way.”

She's finding healing in her own struggles by playing Gussie each night on the stage.

“This whole experience has been very cathartic because it's about artists in New York City over the course of a stretch of their careers and trying to make it survive and hold onto their relationships. So it is very personal,” she says.