Not a Child's Play

She’s already made a big splash on Broadway, but actress Alex Humphreys was only a guppie when the golden-voiced singer first dove into her acting career at Stage Left Children’s Theater in Tappan, New York. It was there that she landed the lead role as Ariel in “The Little Mermaid,” and starred alongside several current Clarkstown North students. Six years later, she is swimming in much deeper waters. 

Humphreys, 22, says she was beaming earlier this year when she landed a role in the six-time Tony winning musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” The megahit production is about a teenager trying to overcome severe social anxiety while dealing with the death of one of his classmates. She played two characters: Alana Beck, a student at Evan’s school, and Zoe Murphy, the sister of Connor Murphy, Evan’s fake best friend who killed himself in the beginning of the show.

“I was just so lucky to have [been] given this opportunity that I had to take it,” Humphreys told Ram’s Horn from the library at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a junior. 

On the “Great White Way,” she was in good company. During her run, New Jersey-born Humphreys acted alongside “Stranger Things” star Gaten Matarazzo. In “Dear Evan Hansen,” he played Jared Kleinman, Evan’s “best friend” and a member of the Connor Project, which was used to keep Connor’s memory alive by giving an outlet to other students who were going through similar situations. Humphreys shared that she and Matarazzo have remained close friends since “Dear Evan Hansen”' ended its six-year run in September. 

“He's one of my closest friends now and I feel so lucky for that,” Humphreys said, admitting she was initially star struck by Matarazzo, but eventually saw him as more of a mentor. “When I first met him, I was like ‘oh my god this is so cool.’ ” 

Working alongside Mazzarato gave Humphreys a taste of what life was like living as a celebrity. “It’s so interesting to see how he moves in the world just because he can’t really walk down the street without anyone stopping him. It was just wild and so eye opening about what it's like to live a life like he does,” she said.

Despite his fame and success at such a young age, Humphreys shared that Matarazzo still wants to have a somewhat normal life in his 20s, attending college like some of his fellow “Stranger Things” stars, such as Noah Schnapp, who currently goes to the University of Pennsylvania. 

Meanwhile, playing in the big leagues has given Humphreys a taste of how to balance a jam-packed double life, juggling school work with Broadway. When she wasn’t belting out hits from “Dear Evan Hansen” like Requiem or Only Us, she was doing homework, working towards her BFA in Musical Theater.

“I was taking a couple of online classes, which I was lucky enough to do backstage.” Humphreys said. “You got the show at night, but you [still] have the whole day.” 

She also shared that “Most likely, [people in the Broadway industry] are on Instagram and will check their DMs…if you want to send them a message and get in contact with them, a lot of times they’ll answer you, help you, and give you more contacts to lead you in the direction that you want to go in.”

Humphreys didn’t always crave the spotlight. When she was younger, she was really shy, but loved to sing and was looking for an outlet to perform. As soon as she stepped on stage, it was like the stars had finally aligned.  

“I was very shy and I didn’t like to talk to anybody. I kind of [just] stayed to myself. I really loved to sing and my mom was like, ‘she needs an outlet. She needs something.’ So she pushed me to do Stage Left. Everything kind of grew from there,” Humphreys told Ram’s Horn. 

When she was 15-years-old, Stage Left cast her as the lead in “The Little Mermaid,” and she blew audiences away during a two-week run at Nyack’s Ritterhouse Theater. 

Humphreys’ biggest piece of advice for young actors who want to carve out their own careers early on is to always bring personality into the audition process.

“Everybody’s trying to be this one character that they want, but everybody’s going to do it a little differently. If you try to be what everybody else is, you’re not going to be yourself,” she said, noting that the process is about, “Always bringing it back to who you are and why you’re going in for this specific part at this specific time.” That’s exactly what she did when portraying her roles in “Dear Evan Hansen.” When she read the girl roles, she felt she could “see [herself] in both of these people.” 

When asked about her dream role, Humphreys said it would be to return to Broadway and star in Anais Mitchell’s musical “Hadestown” as Eurydice, a young woman working in a poverty-stricken industrial underworld before she’s rescued by her lover, singer-songwriter Orpheus.

“I would love to play that part. I think that would be my dream right now, [but] things change, you never know,” she said.

While Humphreys is humble about her journey to Broadway, she has an optimistic outlook for others wanting to break into show biz. She encourages leveraging the power of social media, noting that actors and backstage crew members are just a “Direct Message” away.