From the immersive Circle in the Square stage to working with Jeremy Jordan, Carrie St. Louis gives us an inside look at playing Sandra Dee and bringing the world of Bobby Darin to life in “Just in Time.”

I’m a pop-culture writer covering everything from TV and movies, to music, Broadway, books, and games.

At the center of that whirlwind is Carrie St. Louis, starring as legendary actress Sandra Dee opposite Jeremy Jordan’s Bobby Darin. Having previously played Glinda in Wicked and originated the role of Dolly Parton in Dolly: A True Original Musical, Carrie knows a thing or two about stepping into the shoes of iconic performers.

To learn more about Just in Time, I caught up with Carrie to hear about taking the stage as Sandra Dee, her hilarious backstage antics with Jeremy Jordan, and the advice she's carried from Dolly Parton herself.

Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Carrie: We have a great friendship. The cool thing about doing a show eight times a week is that you get to try new things — everything starts to deepen, and develop, and become way more comfortable.

In the show, Bobby Darin says, "I am a nightclub animal," and I truly think Jeremy Jordan is a Broadway stage animal. Backstage, he's very normal. He's a dad. He loves Broadway softball and escape rooms. When he gets onstage, something just comes alive. He's always doing new things, and it really keeps me on my toes.

We have fight scenes that are different every single night. There's a different vibe to it depending on how our day was going or how we're reacting to each other. It's never the same, and I think that's a really beautiful thing.

I never know what he's going to throw at me, and he doesn't really ever know what I'm going to throw at him, either. Sometimes we'll come offstage, and we'll be like, "Ooh, we really got into it tonight." Then we laugh, and we go home. It's very cool to work with someone like that, and it makes my job way more interesting and fun.

Carrie: I absolutely love Circle in the Square. It's one of my favorite theaters I've ever performed in because I love the intimacy. It's so special that people come from all over to see Broadway in New York, and it's always been a dream of mine to be on Broadway. It's still a pinch-me moment. I'm still that musical theater nerd.

This theater really adds an incredible element to the show because it's about Bobby Darin's life. The thing he loved more than anything else in the world was the live connection with an audience. That's what makes musical theater so special, right?

That connection is the thing that AI cannot reproduce. In this show, we walk through the audience, make eye contact, and tell the story to them. My character breaks the fourth wall immediately, so I have a lot of interaction with the audience. It makes the show different every single night.

When you walk into Circle in the Square, you are immediately transported to the Copa. It takes your breath away. Derek McLane, our set designer, did an incredible job. He and Alex Timbers, our director, worked so well together to make it this fully immersive experience. It's really special. 

Carrie: I was talking to my dressing-room roommate, Olivia Holt, who plays Connie, the other day, and realized I've been doing eight shows a week on Broadway for 14 years now. I think of it like being a long-distance runner. I love live performance more than anything in the world. Being able to have that moment with people that'll never be recreated again is what makes it so exciting for me.

I'm also a vocal coach, so I work with a lot of students on their voice — voice was my first love. I went to college for opera, and then got Rock of Ages right after, and have been on this journey ever since.

The longest relationship I've ever had has been with my voice. I think of it as bandwidth. I wake up in the morning, and I do a full check-in. I'll say, "Okay, where am I at today?" I'll do lip trills and things like that. If my voice feels a little tired, maybe it's because the allergies are bad, or we had a two-show day yesterday.

The requirement of Glinda, for instance, is very different from just being in Act Two of Just in Time. I can have a little more life bandwidth with this show, whereas with Glinda, the life bandwidth was nonexistent.

I have a really strong relationship with my voice. You have to feel out where you're at, and maybe that requires that I have to do a longer warm-up, or I need to do different options or different placements for notes in the show.

Carrie: Dolly has taught me so much. I was so fortunate to spend so much time with her. Normally, when you're portraying a living legend in a musical, they aren't too involved. That is the opposite of Dolly Parton. She is working 9 to 5. She's the first one there in the morning and the last one to leave. She is incredibly dedicated and so giving. She really opened herself up to us and was like, "Ask me any question."

Her dressing room was next to mine at our theater in Nashville, where we did the out-of-town. She was there every single day, and she would come into my dressing room at intermission and be like, "Well, you make me look so good out there." I'm thinking, This is so surreal.

What I really learned from Dolly is that she has the highest level of emotional intelligence of anyone I've ever met. She is this huge star, and people feel so strongly about her because she has genuinely been that good of a person her entire life.

She's truly so giving and generous. She can immediately identify what you need in a situation and make you feel comfortable. She has a special gift of understanding people. Everyone always asks, "What is she actually like?" I just say it's as simple as: You think she's the most amazing person in the world? She's even better than that.

Note: This chat was a week before Dolly's passing. Rest in peace to a true legend.

Carrie: When I joined the company, [director] Alex Timbers sent me a bunch of reference materials, which is a really cool thing for a director to do. One of those was a book that Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee's son, Dodd Darin, wrote about them and their relationship. It's full of interviews and goes chapter by chapter, switching between Bobby's and Sandra's perspectives.

A lot of the current generation doesn't know who Sandra Dee is. They think she's a character from Grease, and I'm like, "No, no, no. She was literally the Angelina Jolie of her time!" She was a huge movie star, and her story is quite sad. As I was reading that book, I was just crying in my bed.

Our book writers, Warren [Leight] and Isaac [Oliver], did a really good job telling you that her story is sad, but not fully leaning into it, because it would be its own three-act play. I even said on the first day of rehearsal, "She needs her own show, and it cannot be a musical. It's too sad to be a musical!"

It's up to me to infuse what I learned about her into the performance. My track in the show is fast and furious, and you really go from A to Z very quickly. It has been an incredible acting challenge.

The way I approach playing a real person is by finding what makes us similar and going from there. If I'm just impersonating someone, it's not going to feel real, or honest, or true. I have to find that same emotion and feeling inside of me.

I want to do her justice and tell her story. She was the girl next door. She was so young when all of this fame happened to her, and she just didn't have the tools to properly navigate that. She was 16 years old. How do you navigate that? I really feel for her in those moments.

Carrie: We have silly things that we do backstage, because I'm a chaos monster. I'm just running around being silly. I call myself the personality hire of the building.

Jeremy comes up in an elevator — that's how he enters — so from time to time we'll come downstairs and cheer him on before he goes up.

Jeremy also has a dressing-room station on the stage at the end of the show when he's playing himself again, not Bobby Darin. He was allowed to decorate it with things that he would have on his dressing-room station, and one of those things is a picture frame of his family.

(Laughs) From time to time, I've been known to put a different picture in the picture frame, and he will see it onstage. The other day, it was a baby picture of me. It keeps it fresh and fun. We all have little games and things that we do.

Carrie: I look forward to all of it. I love this show. I love my job. I actually get sad when we have a Monday, and I don't have a show, which is crazy.

I look forward to the finale, the megamix we do. I get to sing with Connie, with Olivia, and we get to really rock out. The whole audience is standing, and everyone's at this party together.

There's also a scene I really love called "If I Were a Carpenter," and it's just Jeremy and me sitting on a ledge having a conversation. In a show that's so larger than life at the Copa, it's a really stripped-down scene, and it's about two humans that have experienced a lot of life together and are recognizing that.

There will always be love between them, even if it didn't quite work out. I think it's special to be able to have that quiet moment onstage.

Carrie: When I first saw Just in Time, I saw Jonathan Groff, and the very last monologue is very touching. Especially as someone who loves theater and loves this art form, it just reminds you why we do what we do.

I was a blubbering, sobbing mess, and I was thinking, I have to be in that show, or else I'm gonna be here every night and spend all my money — and I managed to work my way in here.

It's a really great show. It's for every age, every demographic, everybody. My grandmother — it's her favorite thing ever. It sucks you into the world, with the story, the music, the band onstage, and the costumes. It's a dreamy, dreamy gig. I feel very lucky to be a part of it.

Keep up with Carrie on Instagram, @carriestlouis.