Finding Home in Midair: Water for Elephants’ Helen Krushinski on Trust, Touring, and Letting Go
By Avery Anderson
When Helen Krushinski joined the national tour of Water for Elephants, she didn’t expect her greatest lesson to come from the acrobats.
“They’ll be halfway up a pole, three stories high, and if something doesn’t feel right—they stop. They move on,” she says. “As an actor, I’m such a perfectionist, but watching them taught me that it’s okay to take where you are that day and keep going. You just have to trust yourself—and each other.”
Trust, as it turns out, is the beating heart of Water for Elephants.
Based on Sara Gruen’s bestselling novel, the musical follows Jacob Jankowski, a young man who loses everything and jumps a passing train—only to discover it’s home to a Depression-era circus. There he meets Marlena, the equestrian star trapped in a volatile marriage, whose quiet strength and compassion for the animals pull Jacob—and the audience—into her orbit.
Krushinski plays Marlena, a role she describes as both daunting and deeply personal. “She’s kind, she’s brave, she’s strong. She’s not a pushover,” Krushinski says. “She knows everyone’s livelihood depends on her husband’s temper, and she spends so much of herself trying to protect people from it. She calms him the same way she calms the horses.”
But what makes Water for Elephants extraordinary isn’t just its emotional honesty—it’s how that story comes alive. The stage bursts with human towers, gravity-defying flips, and full-scale animal puppets that breathe, blink, and gallop under the touch of both actors and acrobats.
“It’s hard not to get distracted watching them on stage,” Krushinski laughs. “They’re literally doing tricks where, if they fall, that’s it. The level of trust they have in one another—it’s unbelievable. And then you add the puppetry on top of that. The horse I work with is operated by multiple people, so it’s this constant dance of coordination and feeling. It’s like rubbing your stomach and patting your head while falling in love at the same time.”
That blend of daring and tenderness ripples through the show. As Water for Elephants crisscrosses the country—from Baltimore to Tampa to Fort Lauderdale—Krushinski says each audience finds their own way into its story of belonging. “Everyone knows what it feels like to leave home, to start over, to be lost for a while,” she says. “But this story reminds you—you’re not alone. You don’t have to do any of it alone.”
And that message isn’t just poetic; it’s practical. “Every day, there’s something that terrifies me,” Krushinski admits. “But I know someone’s literally going to catch me.”
In Water for Elephants, that’s both the metaphor and the magic: a show built on leaps of faith—emotional, physical, and artistic. A reminder that home isn’t a place. It’s the people who catch you when you jump.
“I can’t believe I get to do this,” Krushinski says. “Every night, I look around and think—this is what home feels like.”
If You Go
Water for Elephants
Runs Oct. 28–Nov. 2 at the Straz Center in Tampa
Tickets at strazcenter.org