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.