Heartbreak Before the ‘Frozen’ Tiaras

NEW YORK — Caissie Levy had no use for princesses when she was a girl. She was more the tree-climbing, bike-riding type, always scrambling to keep up with her older brothers.

Patti Murin, on the other hand, has long toyed with the tiara. Weaned on “Snow White” and theme parks (yes, both Disneyland and Disney World), she has played princesses throughout her career.

Now the two actresses are opposite each other in one of the most anticipated Broadway shows of the spring, Disney’s “Frozen,” a musical adaptation of the Oscar-winning animated film. Levy, a 36-year-old from Hamilton, Ontario, is Elsa, the self-reliant snow queen who struggles to contain the icy impact of her emotions. Murin, a 37-year-old from Hopewell Junction, New York, is her younger sister, Anna, who overflows with yearning for the warm glow of love.

Conservatory-educated and employed more or less steadily since college, they have each starred at different times in “Wicked” (Levy as Elphaba, Murin as Glinda), and they have both weathered heartbreaking Broadway flops (Levy in “Ghost,” Murin in “Lysistrata Jones”).

And while the new job is as close to steady as anything gets on Broadway, life is not a fairy tale, and both actresses have had moments when they thought “Frozen” would not be their happily ever after.

Murin is among a tiny handful of artists who have been with the musical since a first reading with actors two years ago. The initial director was fired, the set designer quit, choreographers came and went, and the actress who read for Elsa was not ultimately cast.

Murin hung on. (“She broke our heart every time,” said Robert Lopez, one of the show’s songwriters.) But for a time, she wasn’t even sure she wanted the role.

Shortly after a late 2016 “Frozen” workshop, Murin, who is married to actor Colin Donnell (NBC’s “Chicago Med”), learned that she was pregnant. She was thrilled, and surprised, and told her parents she would be having a baby instead of doing the Disney musical.

But then, at eight weeks, an ultrasound revealed that her fetus had no heartbeat. She had to medically induce contractions at home. “It was one of the most absolutely devastating times of my life — to go from ‘we’re having a baby’ to mourning the loss,” she said.

That same week, Disney — which had no idea about Murin’s circumstances — called. The show was arranging a “mix and match” — auditioning potential Annas against potential Elsas — and wanted to see Murin again. She refused. “I didn’t have it in me,” she said. “I said, ‘You know what I can do.’ If you want to offer it to me, I’ll gladly think about it.”

“My plan was to let ‘Frozen’ do what it was going to do, and we were going to try to have a baby again,” she said.

But Disney persisted. The creative team had cast Levy as Elsa and was inclined to give Murin the role of Anna but needed her to come in and read a scene with her.

Murin was torn. “I was made to play this role,” she said. But she wanted a child, and if she were to do “Frozen,” she would choose to put that off. She thought back to a conversation with Audra McDonald, the much-honored Broadway actress, who gave birth in 2016 at age 46.

“I said, ‘How do you do this?'” Murin recalled. “One thing she said really stuck with me: ‘There’s a little soul, just waiting, and that little soul is waiting for the right time.'” McDonald also remembers the conversation. “I just let her know it’s going to be OK — if the role is going to be hers, it’s hers, and the same with the pregnancy,” she said. “I’d been through similar issues, and so she and I were able to commiserate.”

Murin went in to meet Levy — they knew each other only casually — and as soon as Levy asked how she’d been, she blurted out that she had just lost a pregnancy. Levy confided that she had had a similar experience.

“I said, ‘I’ve been there — I know what that is,’ and we just held each other’s hands,” Levy recalled. “And then we went in and read together.”

Levy’s own path to “Frozen” had also been complicated by her desire to be a mother. After a miscarriage, she had a difficult pregnancy in 2016, giving birth at 34 weeks to a 3-pound boy by C-section. Six weeks later, she was in an audition room, belting out Elsa’s power ballad “Let It Go” for the Disney team. She didn’t get the role.

Levy, who is married to David Reiser, a professor of theater at Stockton University, focused on nurturing her son — Izaiah, now 2, and healthy — and began looking for other opportunities. But then Disney called again. A new director, Michael Grandage, was reopening the casting process. Levy returned to the audition room.

Grandage and Levy, who had never met, hit it off. “Caissie came in and offered a layer of humanity that I had never seen in the role,” he said.

Levy got the part. Murin got hers, too. And now every night, Murin’s character has an onstage exchange with Hans, the show’s handsome prince. “You want a family?” Anna asks. “Of course, don’t you?” Hans responds. “Very much,” she answers. Grandage said whenever he sees the exchange, it is moving in a different way. “She accesses something so pure and beautiful and deep,” he said.

Murin, who hopes to have children after her time with “Frozen” is over, notices it, too. “There are some nights when it really hits me, not in a sad way, but I feel it so viscerally every time,” she said. “It’s never a tough moment, but it’s always an emotional one.”

Yet it is largely Murin’s gift for comedy that has become her calling card.

Douglas Carter Beane, who wrote the book for her last two Broadway shows, “Xanadu” and “Lysistrata Jones,” said the actress’s ability to land a joke stood out. “There was something mischievous going on,” he said. “It was not for nothing that her big debut (in ‘Lysistrata’) was as a cheerleader — she is a cheerleader for everybody in the show, and the audience.”

Essential among Levy’s skills for “Frozen” is the ability to consistently land “Let It Go,” which stands as the musical’s Act 1 closer. “Her vocal resources are so great that they seem to be effortless, and she has convincing emotional range as well,” said Matthew Warchus, who directed her in “Ghost.” “She’s got a very interesting, pure voice, which doesn’t strain when it belts.” The two actresses live across the street from each other on the Upper West Side, but, like the sisters they portray, they are quite different. Levy is rigorously disciplined about sleep, exercise and diet (“there’s nothing worse than being onstage and feeling compromised because you ate pizza last night”) and mindful of how she presents herself to the world (“I feel really torn about social media — the nice Canadian girl in me finds it vulgar”). She spends much of her free time at the gym, leaning on Pilates to ease the muscle strain of her 15-pound costumes, and shooting hoops to relax.

Murin is freewheeling (“I really like cheese, so I’m not ever going to give that up”) and confessional, sharing on social media about her battle with depression and her unsuccessful first marriage, as well as her passion for books, rescue dogs and “The Bachelor.” (“I can’t imagine living a life where I feel like I have to hide something from people,” she said.)

They have forged a fast friendship, holding hands at curtain calls and texting and tweeting at each other through the day. They acknowledge that their obvious sisterly connection helps reinforce the show’s themes, but they also say it is genuine. “When you’re carrying a show with another person, you’re in it together for the long haul,” Levy said. “But I had no idea it would be so easy.”

“Frozen,” which is now in previews and opens March 22 at the St. James Theater, arrives on Broadway at a moment when the treatment and depiction of women in the entertainment industry is a much-discussed subject. The stage show, like the film that preceded it, has two women shaping its story — Jennifer Lee, who wrote and co-directed the film, then wrote the musical’s book, and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, in partnership with her husband, Lopez, wrote the songs for film and stage.

Elsa has drawn attention as the rare Disney heroine whose happiness is not tied to a relationship with a man — Levy noted that she is the first character she’s ever played who did not have a love interest. And for the stage, Disney is doubling down on Elsa’s fierceness: After dressing her in a negligee (and barefoot) for the show’s final scenes during a pre-Broadway run last summer in Denver, the creative team decided to put her in pants (and boots) on Broadway — a change with obvious symbolic overtones.

“For so many reasons, I really identify with Elsa,” Levy said, “with her perfectionism, and her sense of expectation for herself and for other people, her moral compass, her obsession with right and wrong, and doing what’s best for everyone, and keeping it together, and being strong.

“Part of me didn’t believe that I was the princess Disney needed,” she added. “But now I think that’s precisely why I was cast.”

As for Murin, playing this princess, one whose emotionality and spunk match her own, has turned out to feel just right: “I’ve never been so dirty and so exhausted and so happy while doing a show.”