BWW Interviews: JEKYLL & HYDE National Tour's Laura Helm Talks of First Big Show

As JEKYLL & HYDE tours around the country, newcomer, Laura Helm is enjoying every minute playing the role of Lucy Harris. It was a dream of hers to be able to play this role and enjoy life on the road. BWW caught up with Laura as she was preparing for a visit to San Antonio's Tobin Center for the Performing Arts with the touring cast.

Tell us more about yourself and how you got started.

I was born and raised in Long Beach, California. My dad got transferred to Massachusetts. I've always been performing. I did cheerleading for ten years and was involved in all the sports. I was always performing in community theaters, in high school and one day I said to my mom, "I wanna be an actress." I started auditioning for a bunch of colleges around the area that had B.A.'s for musical theater I ended up getting into the Hart School of Theater at the University of Hartford in Hartford, Connecticut. I studied there and from there, I've been working professionally for the last three years since I graduated. This is my first national tour.

How did you get the role?

I was in a theater in Manchester, New Hampshire and I had just moved out of my apartment in New York City. About a week before I left, my agent a sent me a call for the national tour. I was only going in for Lucy Harris. Luckily things panned out. The day that I had to go in to the city for the audition, I had the day off in New Hampshire. I thank my mother for every second her and I drove. She was willing and ready to drive a ten hour round trip with me. So, we drove in and in the room they actually told me I had a callback and the callback was two or three days later. Inside I was like, "Yes, this is wonderful." And then I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, another ten hour drive." But luckily we had that day off as well. My schedule panned out perfectly. In the callback room I actually read and sang with two people that I'm currently working with which was wonderful. I remember leaving the room, "That felt great." A few days later, they called me with the offer. It all happened very quickly.

Tell us about Jekyll & Hyde.

It's based off the novel by Robert Stevens Lewis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's (about) Dr. Jekyll who creates an antidote that basically splits a human personality of good and evil. He tries to get a test subject from mental hospitals to do it on and no one would let him do that so he goes out with a friend of his and ends up going to a whore house and my character is Lucy Harris and he sees me as the lead entertainer at this place and something inside of him realizes that he should use the test on himself. So he does the experiments on himself and instead of splitting good and evil, it completely splits his personality into a schizophrenic type situation and Hyde is created. The Hyde portion of him becomes obsessed with my character. It's a pretty interesting trail to watch his love triangle between his fiancé and Lucy Harris. It's saddening to watch how Jekyll is very good friends and looks out and has a respect for Lucy and is in love with Emma but Hyde takes over and stalks her throughout the whole show.

What do you like most about being on the road?

It's cool to experience all the different things; doing things I never thought I pictured myself spending a week in Iowa. It's been really fun. You get to experience so many different cultures and just watching how the weather changes when you go from Minnesota to Ohio. It's really fun. I always had this goal of before I'm 30, I'd love to visit all 50 states. Right now, I think by the end of this tour I'll have five or six states left to go visit. It's been a fun ride. Sleeping on the bus is not as bad as one might think.

Have you ever been to Texas before?

We actually went to Lubbock. We went to three different places in the first leg of the tour. So, we were there for a week and I had never gone before.

If you had not gotten into show business, what do you think you would have done?

I guess if I wasn't going to go into some sort of performing route, I would have studied Communications in college. But, I have this weird love of dermatology. I told my mom I was willing to go to some sort of medical school it would have been in dermatology or esthetician. I don't know why. It's a very random thing.

What advice do you have for people thinking about getting into show business?

I would say if you want something and you think you are good enough, you just have to push, you have to try. There's a lot of things that never panned out for me. I've always wanted to play Lucy Harris and I never really thought I'd get to do it the first time at this caliber. When I was doing college auditions, one of my audition songs was "Someone Like You." I remember thinking, "This would be such a fun role to play." It's funny to look back at auditioning with college and now I get to perform it seven times a week is an awesome experience. It's a cool thing to look back on how long I have been singing that song. There's a lot of times where you can put yourself down and you've gone for 50 auditions in a row and you haven't gotten one. But, if you believe in yourself and you think you're good enough, you just need to prove you're good enough.

JEKYLL & HYDE plays at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts from February 17-19, 2015. Tickets can be purchased by going to the Tobin Center's website.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Tremmel

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