For Broadway star Eva Noblezada, acting isn’t just about inhabiting a role but also being part of a spiritual exchange that is as old as time. Watching Eva Noblezada ’s backstage get-ready-with-me videos will tell you a few things about the theater actress: that she does her own makeup, that she listens to music to get into the right headspace, and that she might have a bottle of gin stashed somewhere. But what really comes through is that she’s an enchantingly zany, relatable ball of chaotic good.

Theater can be a magical, transformative space, but Eva makes the magic accessible, her infectious energy inviting audiences into a rarified world turned real. When we connected online, closing the 13-hour gap between New York and Manila, the United States had just elected a convicted felon as its 47th president. I ask Eva how the theater community has been processing the results, wondering if this unwanted moment has affected the energy of her immediate shows.

“There’s a lyric in The Great Gatsby that I sing, ‘Let my girl be a fool to whom it won’t occur that the choices she makes in this life are never hers.’ [With the overturning of Roe versus Wade], that was a horrible thing to sing the night after he got elected,” Eva says. “The whole audience could feel it too.

” She points out that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was written a hundred years ago, yet here they are. Again.

If Eva were still performing in Hadestown , the musical retelling of Greek mythology w.