New York City’s Belasco Theatre first opened its doors in 1907 with a production of A Grand Army Man, going on to premiere productions of seminal plays such as Rocky Horror Picture Show and stage Tony-award-winning adaptations of Shakespeare classics. Now, it is the stage on which Helen J Shen will make her Broadway debut. Having risen through the ranks over the past few years on a series of off-Broadway productions, Shen is starring opposite Golden Globe and Emmy award winner Darren Criss in Will Aronson and Hue Park’s sci-fi, romantic musical Maybe Happy Ending. Set in late-21st century Korea, the story follows two life-like Helperbots each at the end of their warranty, whose chance encounter unravels a tale reshaping the traditional mould of relationships.

Darren Criss: Good morning! We started our first day in the theatre yesterday. How does it all feel?
Helen J Shen: It was wild to be there because it’s a gorgeous theatre. It’s like a little jewellery box, it’s so ornate and intricate. I saw How To Dance in Ohio in the balcony at the Belasco Theatre, and I was thinking about how many shows specifically in the Belasco that I’ve been a fan of, not even having seen them, but just knowing the impact of them. Knowing that this will be a part of its legacy forever is wild.

DC: By ‘this’, you mean yourself, Helen J Shen. Your name is on the marquee in lights.
HJS: Nobody told me about that before it happened. I just got a picture of it when it was up.

DC: Really?! You didn’t know that your name was going to be up on the marquee?
HJS: No! It wasn’t something we had talked about or agreed upon, I feel like the production and the powers that be have been like, “This is an introduction moment for you.” They didn’t have to do that.

DC: It is. It’s a fitting gesture to have your name outside to let people know who is lighting up the theatre inside. While we’re talking about the Belasco and your love of going to Broadway shows, you grew up in Jersey so you weren’t too far from the city, did you grow up going to Broadway shows? Tell me about your experience in two ways, the actual going to Broadway and the consumption of Broadway culture, which are not necessarily the same thing. I didn’t grow up near New York, I wasn’t a ferry ride or subway ride away, I was across the country so for me, Broadway was what I would pick up in record shops. Cast albums would come out and that’s how I would familiarise myself with what was going on. You were much closer to it and you grew up with more resources on the internet. I want to hear how Broadway was part of your life as baby Shel?
HJS: Baby Shel was introduced to the tenth anniversary concert of Les Misérables, I had the physical VHS.

DC: I had that same one!
HJS: We wore that VHS to its strings, it was replayed so much. I came into the city more so to do piano stuff because I was competitive starting from six years old. I would go to Carnegie Hall and Steinway Hall.

DC: Wait, unpack that for me. When you say you were competitive, what does that entail?
HJS: Classical music competitions.

DC: A literal piano duel.
HJS: Correct.

DC: How would one be adjudicated?
HJS: How accurate you were, or how close you could get to perfect, which is an interesting way for me to have been introduced to music.

DC: I have so many thoughts on that.
HJS: As an artist, there is no right way to do something. So to have such a narrow idea of what successful musicianship is was kind of soul-crushing. Now, I love classical music, I love playing the piano but I had to rediscover that love because it was so intense.

“Theatre brought me so much joy, it was undeniable that I was going to pursue it. It unlocked something else in me.”

DC: How old were you when you were doing this?
HJS: The first time I competed on a national scale I was ten or eleven.

DC: Wow. What was your piece that you always got ‘perfect’? I have strong feelings about what that means but within the rules of the competitive piano world.
HJS: Chopin Nocturne no. 2 in D flat major was a huge one for me. Concertos were huge, I did a Bach concerto, and a Chopin concerto – I just love Chopin so much. Romantic music is the genre for me.

DC: Agreed.
HJS: No shade to the Baroque period. [laughs]

DC: I’m with you, I did a lot of Baroque stuff because the violin is the same. I didn’t compete but I played in a lot of Philharmonic and Baroque quartets and as a result, it’s a lot of cocktail hour music for dukes and duchesses, as opposed to the romance of Chopin and Tchaikovsky. It frustrates me to no end that you guys had to compete.
HJS: I already knew my passion for it was in music in general and being on stage. Piano brought me to Italy a lot, I spent a lot of time going abroad at a young age. It was my first time being away from home, I was ten the first time I went to Italy by myself.

DC: By yourself?!
HJS: The piano teachers were there and there were chaperones.

DC: Yeah but without parents, to me that’s kind of by yourself. When you’re ten that’s a big deal.
HJS: I remember being like, “Mum, dad, stop being so on top of me! I’m trying to be cool around my new friends.” Then the first day I got there I got motion sickness from the plane, I didn’t want to watch the horror movie that everyone was watching so I stayed in my room and suddenly had a wave of, “Oh my god, I’m in another country for fifteen days without my parents!”

DC: Fifteen days?! At ten years old! That’s hard graft, dude.
HJS: It’s an eternity when you’re ten. The SIM card wasn’t working, first panic attack – woo!

DC: Wow, you wear that like a champ. I can’t be casual about that, that’s pretty intense. On top of this, assuming you had to compete.
HJS: Yeah. Also timing-wise in Italy, everything starts later, plus jet lag.

DC: I never really thought about soloist musicianship being a competition, but if you’re on this track and you’re studying classical, at what point does it pivot to being an actor? Or singing? I don’t know which one was the first gateway.
HJS: I did theatre, my first community theatre was doing Gretl in The Sound of Music in a local production. It was never the thing that was the main focus, it was always the tangential thing if you have time. My parents heard about Paper Mill’s [Playhouse] educational programme and the thing about Chinese immigrant parents is, if you’re going to do anything, you’re going to do it to its fullest extent, you’re not going to half-arse it and you’re not going to quit even if it’s hard. That’s been engrained in me from an early age. Theatre brought me so much joy, it was undeniable that I was going to pursue it. It unlocked something else in me. I grew up sort of isolated, I’m an only child and I was like, “I don’t want to sit in a practice room by myself anymore, I want to do things with other people.”

DC: Were you doing this at the Paper Mill programme while you were competing in piano? Was there a clear turning point?
HJS: In high school, the summer months were prime real estate for the things that I wanted to do instead of school, the fifteen days of that Italy programme directly conflicted with the July conservatory at Paper Mill so I had to be like, “This year I’m going to do this, next year I’m going to do Italy.” Then starting in mid-high school I was like, “I think that there is something that I love to do and there’s something I feel obligated to do.” I wanted to be with my Paper Mill fam. That was where I first sang Cornet Man from Funny Girl which ended up being my college audition song.

DC: Nice! Did you learn Cornet Man from that or were you a fan of Barbra [Streisand] or Funny Girl before?
HJS: It was a deep cut.

DC: Funny Girl for teenagers is categorically a deep cut. That’s not something teenagers are listening to, call me completely out of touch.
HJS: Barbra has always been ingrained in the canon for me. Growing up it was always like, here’s Audra [McDonald], Barbra and Lea [Salonga], these are the voices.

DC: Was there a point where you knew you could do this to a degree that was a little more serious than the other kids? I’m not trying to blow your shit up, I think we can both agree you have a very strong voice, that’s why we’re here. [laughs] But, if you’re playing a piano all the time you’re not sitting there singing, so when did you realise?
HJS: I don’t know, but the role that is highlighted in my head is when I played Mushu in sixth grade in Mulan Jr.

DC: [laughs] Does Mushu get a song in the junior version?
HJS: She does. It didn’t age well.

DC: Well, it gave you a gateway to singing, so regardless of its content it sounds like this was a moment.
HJS: It was a moment where I was like, “Not only do I like it but it likes me a little bit.” My house was filled with music but it was always a secondary thing. Doing something scary like pursuing art as a career, I remember fighting so hard and being like, “My parents don’t understand, they want me to find something that has stability.” Then I was talking to my godmother about it who I’m very close with and she was like, “How risky and scary was it for them to come to America?” Not knowing the language, not having any financial stability, just on a hope and dream – building a community out of nothing, helping each other out. All of these things that I definitely took for granted and was like, “They don’t understand!” But to then reframe, they were so punk for coming here. [Darren applauds] I will never understand how scary that was, but also they did that with the hopes that I could pursue something I am passionate about. When I graduated from high school my dad made a speech about how he was very inspired by the risk I was taking, to have that transition of “I thought you had all the answers, I’m mad at you for not having all the answers,” and then to be like, “They’re learning from me?!” It’s wild.

“This already being the Broadway debut is such a glorious victory. I would like to sit on the stage and soak it all in.”

DC: That’s how it works, in teaching you shall learn. I love the idea that them embarking on this wild west hope and a dream tale is parallel to your own. How old were your parents when they emigrated to the United States?
HJS: They were in grad school so about my age.

DC: If we’re talking about parallels, I was also 24 when I made my Broadway debut.
HJS: I know! We’ve been talking about it feeling like a homecoming of sorts for you, can you speak more about that?

DC: Well, it’s a relief they haven’t kicked me out yet. I’ll just say that. I tend to hang out at the party longer than I probably should so I’m always very conscious of the host being like, “Alright, this is it.”
HJS: The host being the ghost of David Belasco.

DC: He’s definitely on the invite committee, for sure. I wouldn’t say it’s a homecoming, it’s just a continuous grateful lap around the arena. Sometimes I’m in the crowd, sometimes I’m on the field, but for most of my life I was outside dying to get in, they haven’t kicked me out yet and I’m just happy to be in any part of it. We both went to the University of Michigan and you told me a great story that I would love to share, we were talking about what show really knocked you on your ass?
HJS: Impact-wise, the show you’re talking about is Passing Strange. I was deck electrician on practicum one of my freshman year, it was my first semester of college and there was nothing to do for this show because it was so hands-on by everybody in the cast. All I was tasked to do was to watch and be an audience member, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart was the director of this production and so many amazing alumni are in this production, it changed how I thought theatre could be. Passing Strange is sort of autobiographical of Stew’s [author, Passing Strange] life, him and his writing partner Heidi Rodewald wrote it for The Public Theatre and then it happened on Broadway at The Belasco. Seeing the Michigan production made me realise my peers were part of this intricate storytelling and were so hands-on in creating, there were things that were divisive and I didn’t know theatre could do that. It inspires me as a hopeful writer and performer in general that we can experience and understand life through these other mediums and make it artful and beautiful. I saw it twenty times and sobbed every time.

DC: You’re speaking to something that really hit me when I was also at Michigan, when you’re in those amazing sponge years of eighteen to 22. I’ll be frank, the musical theatre department at The University of Michigan is a very prestigious, well-known and really incredible programme – I was not a part of this programme. [both laugh] The reason why I’m saying this is because I was completely blown away by the musical theatre kids – it was the first time meeting kids my age doing things that pros do. As we approach your Broadway debut, is there anything from the vision board or the dream catalogue where you’re like, “When I get to Broadway, I’ve always wanted to…”
HJS: This already being the Broadway debut is such a glorious victory. I would like to sit on the stage and soak it all in. [laughs]

DC: Empty theatres to me are churches, they’re these very sacred holy places.
HJS: We have ghosts in ours!

DC: We do have ghosts. The Belasco is famously one of the most storied theatres on Broadway. There is a holiness to the literal or figurative ‘ghosts’ of the theatre, this is a place where people go to be moved and to feel some kind of catharsis, not unlike the many holy houses of any house of worship around the world throughout time. Being in a theatre alone is a really sacred experience, I hope you find a second amongst all the craziness to do that. Are there any heroes that you grew up idolising? Because I guarantee you whether you like it or not, in a few months’ time there are going to be kids watching this that will forever hold the name Helen J Shen sacred because of this cast album. Not to say the pressure is on but it’s more of a polite reminder that the wheel does spin around.
HJS: It was Lea [Salonga] in that 10th- anniversary concert.

DC: Yeah dude, me too honestly.
HJS: For her to have done Miss Saigon at the age that she did is just so wild, it’s amazing. I have since been fortunate enough to meet and work with amazing people who have also been doing incredible work, for way longer than I’ve been alive.

DC: Well, that is how I feel about getting to work with you and you’ve only just begun… [Darren sings] And… we’ve only just begun our day because we’ve got to go to tech.
HJS: We’ve got to go to tech!

Interview originally published in The HERO Winter Annual 2024.

HAIR TAKAO HAYASHI;
MAKE-UP MAKI RYOKE AT WALTER SCHUPFER USING LAURA MERCIER;
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANTS WIL PIERCE AND DAVIEL CASTAÑEDA;
PRODUCTION JENNY PIO