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Updated 6 hours ago
In just 10 years since leaving Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University grad Kristolyn Lloyd has graduated from smaller off-Broadway fare to a major presence in Broadway's newest hot ticket, “Dear Evan Hansen.”
The millennial musical now at the Music Box Theatre in New York boasts a score by Oscar-nominated Benj Pasek and Justin Paul of “La La Land” fame, and book by Steven Levenson.
In a way, Lloyd, 32, has landed in her own lyrical La La Land, 3,000 miles away from Los Angeles, the city where she tried to get a career going after leaving CMU.
The show follows a high school student with low self-esteem (Ben Platt), who, at the direction of his therapist, writes letters of support to himself. One of the letters is picked up by troubled student Connor Murphy (Mike Faist), who later commits suicide with the letter in his pocket. Everyone assumes it's a suicide note and that Connor and Evan were great friends.
Evan becomes a school hero for befriending the mentally mixed-up Connor, and decides to continue the ruse with more fabricated letters. As one character in on the deceit acknowledges, Connor's death was the best thing to happen to Evan.
Lloyd plays Alana Beck, an ambitious and annoying overachieving senior who finds a calling — and a great credit for her college application — in serving as co-president of the Connor Project, a viral campaign to commemorate the late student by refurbishing a local park where more fabricated “Dear Evan” letters told of Evan and Connor spending time there.
Lloyd delivers on a level that has attracted critical acclaim. The Houston-area native — who, from 2010 to 2013, starred in TV's “The Bold and the Beautiful” — knows what some good letters of support could have meant to her personally, especially coming from those who doubted her talents early on.
Some skeptical CMU professors wouldn't sign off on her request to be a musical theater major, contending that she didn't have the talent. But not everyone saw it that way. Claudia Benack, a professor in the university's musical theater department, “offered me free voice lessons, and encouraged me to go knocking on their doors.”
Those who once knocked the drama major came around eventually, especially when Lloyd came up with a resume rich in musical performances post-graduation off-Broadway.
“Some of those same professors said later that they took back what they had said,” Lloyd says.
But that doesn't mar the performer's memories of the school or Pittsburgh, even though, “coming from a (small) community outside of Houston it was somewhat of a culture shock” moving to her new home. “Being exposed to Pittsburgh was both exciting and terrifying.”
She describes CMU as “a magical place,” a higher-education Hogwarts. “It was like being a big fish arriving at a school filled with big fish,” she says of her first year there in 2003. “There were very high expectations of the kind of work you'd produce.”
It also was illuminating — in a dark way. “It's where I experienced my first case of reverse discrimination,” she recalls.
That happened when a black student she was talking to took exception to her speaking style, and “said I was trying to pass for white, that I didn't sound like a black woman speaking.
“I was so hurt by that; shaken by it. I went crying to my dad, who told me, ‘You're a big girl now, be prepared for situations like that.' ”
Two years after moving to Los Angeles, after her earning a bachelors of fine arts from CMU, Lloyd decided she'd had enough of the acting scene. “I quit acting in 2009 and found it exciting to live a different lifestyle.”
Lloyd spent the next year as a missionary in Southeast Asia, traveling with Youth with a Mission in Thailand, Malaysia and trailblazing through the jungles of Borneo.
“I was thinking of doing it for the rest of my life,” she says of her missionary work. “But the agency I went with requires that after you leave the field, you spend some time at home before making a decision.”
A recording of “In the Heights,” the Tony Award-winning production by “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, ended up changing the course of her life.
“Listening to that was like a bolt of lightning. That made me go back to acting,” she says.
Lloyd was able to use her missionary accomplishments and the newfound perspective on poverty to help shape her character, Dayzee Leigh, a Skid Row resident trying to improve her position in life, in “The Bold and the Beautiful.” The actress received an NAACP Image Award nomination for her work.
“I did feel different,” she says of the way her missionary efforts affected her portrayal. Others saw it, too, with some friends calling her “a more connected, grounded woman.”
Lloyd still connects to her missionary work in a grand way: She was one of the performers in “Witness Uganda,” a musical production based on co-creator Griffin Matthews' first-hand involvement in raising educational levels for youngsters in Uganda. The actress joined other cast members on a trip to Uganda last year “to meet the people we were portraying” and how they benefited from funds raised by the show.
“Finding oneself is an evolution,” says Lloyd. “I learn more about myself every day, in every way. I am happy with my work, my love of my family and my relationship with God.”
Michael Elkin is a Tribune-Review contributing writer and is also an award-winning arts writer, playwright and author of the novel, “I, 95.”
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