*Houston native Kristolyn Lloyd makes her Broadway debut in the critically-acclaimed Dear Evan Hansen, playing at the Music Box Theatre. Dear Evan Hansen is nominated for nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The cast includes Ben Platt, Laura Dreyfuss, Rachel Bay Jones, Jennifer Laura Thompson, Mike Faist, Michael Park, Will Roland, Michael Lee Brown, Garrett Long, Olivia Puckett, Colton Ryan, and Asa Somers.
Lloyd portrays a highly intelligent 17-year-old overachiever named Alana Beck who plays a pivotal role in the life of the title character, a boy who feels like an outsider. Through a tragedy, he’s able to create a life he always wanted, but it’s created through a lie. Alana latches on to the tragedy’s survivors, making herself useful by creating opportunities to benefit those close to her as well as the larger community.
Lloyd’s journey to Broadway is unique. After earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Lloyd took a year off to make sure acting was something she wanted to do. Lloyd was involved in an international missionary program, Youth with a Mission. Before she headed to Southeast Asia on a mission, she was required to enter the organization’s three-month training program in Hawaii.
After training, the group traveled the villages and jungles of Borneo in Indonesia, where they visited leper colonies. The group also helped to build a kindergarten school. In Thailand, the missionaries helped build a bridge in Bangkok’s notorious slums. On the last stop of the tour, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the group worked with a youth ministry at a church and participated as guest speakers. During the tour, the missionaries worked with numerous mercy ministries on evangelism and outreach programs within the different villages. The Youth with a Mission organization partnered with other churches and pastors who were natives of the country.
“I loved doing missionary work,” says Lloyd. “It was incredible. I was working with other people in their 20s. We had a blast. It was a lot of work, and it was hard, but we also had a lot of fun. We went cliff diving one time in the middle of the night. I was terrified, but I’ll never forget that I went cliff diving in the jungles of Borneo.”
The 20something missionaries lived in two-room huts. They slept on the foundations, which were built out of mud and cement. According to Lloyd, it was “jungle living.” Lloyd says the natives were so welcoming that they would offer their homes to them. For three months, they took bucket showers in the river.
“The food was good,” says Lloyd. “We ate whatever they [natives] cooked. Everything was prepared in the jungle. Chicken, pork, a lot of chicken, and rice and greens and vegetables. They threw down for us. We had to boil the water before we drank it.”
While she was in the jungles, she was listening to the original cast recording of In the Heights. After three months, her vision of returning to acting was clear. “I missed it so much while I was there,” she says. “Sometimes we would put it [In the Heights music] on a speaker, and I would lip-sync some of the scenes and act out for my teammates. We didn’t have a television, so that was our form of entertainment.”
After life as a missionary, Lloyd returned to Los Angeles and landed a three-year contract on the CBS daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful. She portrayed Dayzee Leigh Forrester, a character whose storyline was inspired by her missionary work in the United States and abroad. Eight months before she started on The Bold and the Beautiful, Lloyd completed another assignment through Youth with a Mission with the Dream Center, working with various mercy ministries within the streets of Los Angeles’ Skid Row. Through the Dream Center, Lloyd also participated as a volunteer with several rescue mission organizations. The producers of The Bold and the Beautiful used real homeless people in one of the show’s episodes, where their stories were shared and made part of the storyline.
After her successful run on The Bold and the Beautiful, Lloyd participated in a workshop for the Off-Broadway bound show Heathers: The Musical. During that same period, she was also performing with another musical, Witness Uganda, and had to make a choice between the two productions. She chose Witness Uganda. After she finished with that production, she received a call to return to Heathers: The Musical, which was headed to New York.
Residing in New York now for nearly four years, Lloyd spends her down time developing several of her creative projects. A songwriter and guitarist, she’s building a music catalog that ranges from pop, rock, and folk music. Lloyd is also developing a television pilot, which she would like to write, direct and star in; she is inspired by the journey into television by Issa Rae, creator of HBO’s Insecure. She has also created a children’s book, name after her mother, Lillie Pearl, about a child detective. Lloyd says her mom is adamant about getting the book published.
Lloyd works out regularly to music mixes from her two favorite pop culture divas: Rihanna and Beyoncé. When she’s between shows, she frequents Broadway and off-Broadway productions, art galleries, and museums.
Lloyd’s journey into theater started in high school. A late bloomer, she nabbed the title role in Hamlet in her senior year in a bit of unconventional casting. She loves Shakespeare. “Something about it [Hamlet] just clicked. It’s a tough role. It’s something about working hard at finding the character arc and falling in love with the character and becoming the character,” she explains.
The baby of the family, Lloyd credits her older brother, who was a working actor in Hollywood, with helping her to lay the foundation for her career in the performing arts. No longer an actor, he accepted the call to ministry, and pastors at a church in Dallas, Texas.
Lloyd is grateful for all the support that she has received from the theater community, especially from her mentor, Tony-nominated director Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who is a staunch advocate for guiding the young and gifted. Lloyd had the opportunity to work with Santiago-Hudson in Paradise Blue starring Blair Underwood and Andre Holland during the 2015 Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Santiago-Hudson heard that she was interested in directing, and he gave her the opportunity to assist him with Cabin in the Sky at the 2016 Encores series at New York’s City Center.
With career and spiritual support, Lloyd is grateful for all her blessings. “I’m in a very different place spiritually than I was when I did mission work,” she says. “I have so many amazing friends in New York who love God, and I have friends in L.A. that I stay in contact with. They’re constantly praying for me.”
With the success of Dear Evan Hansen, casting directors and producers are already approaching her about other upcoming Broadway productions. But for right now, Lloyd is enjoying her Dear Evan Hansen family. “It’s a beautiful show, and it’s universal, something everyone can relate to.”
Gwendolyn Quinn is an award-winning media consultant with a career spanning more than 25 years. She is a contributor to BlackEnterprise.com, Black Enterprise’s BE Pulse, Huffington Post, EURWEB.com, and Medium.com. Quinn is also a contributor to Souls Revealed and Handle Your Entertainment Business.
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