Interview: Krystina Alabado's Journey From Mystic Pizza to Hazbin Hotel

Krystina Alabado has built an impressive career spanning Broadway, television, and voice acting. Most recently, her past few years have been by her roles in Mystic Pizza: The Musical at regional theaters across the country and the hit animated series Hazbin Hotel, where she voices the role of sinner demon Cherri Bomb.

In Mystic Pizza, now running at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, Alabado has developed a deep connection to her character, Daisy over these multiple productions from Maine to Florida, evolving alongside the show since its early workshops. As Hazbin Hotel continues its rise in popularity and Mystic Pizza finds new audiences, she remains at the center of both — and she can’t believe her good luck.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Your past few years as an actor seem to have been dominated by Mystic Pizza and Hazbin Hotel.
Yeah, it’s been a lot of Hazbin Hotel, a lot of Mystic Pizza, and I did a production of Tick, Tick…Boom! with Andy Mientus a couple of times, too. We did a Zoom workshop of Mystic Pizza and then I think I started recording Hazbin the following year. I’m pretty sure it was when we were doing Mystic Pizza in at Ogunquit in 2021 that I booked Hazbin.

What is it about Mystic Pizza that keeps you coming back as an actor?
It’s an infusion of joy. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s heart-first, it’s grounded, it’s honest, it’s surprising. It’s surprised me since the moment I started working on it, which is why I’m still here and rooting for it.

Tell me about the Zoom workshop of the show and how that worked.
Everyone just wanted to make art and didn’t want to wait. So, we didn’t. We recorded all the songs in advance on our phones or microphones and then they were mixed by Carmel Dean, our musical director, so this kind of Zoom cast album exists somewhere. They wanted people to see the show and take it seriously within this Zoom workshop thing, so we’d do the scenes, and then the recorded songs would start. We didn’t lip sync to it; we would just jive to it.

How has your version of the character grown over the course of the four or five years you’ve been involved?
I’ve been part of pieces for long periods of time; some off and on for upwards of like seven, eight years. What’s so cool is being on stage as this person and getting to really live in her as the show is changing. I feel like I have grown, and Daisy has grown, and the production has grown. It’s a lesson to me as an actor in diving in. If you keep diving in, you continue to find more and more nuance and detail about the character and the piece. I’ve done it so much, but every night, I’m still learning something new about it.

Does your voice-acting career impact your stage work, and vice versa?
Yes, actually. I’ve been voice acting since 2014, when I did a show called Voltron. It’s the best job because they can work around your schedule. I’ve always been able to juggle doing it because they’re flexible, and you can record from anywhere. With Hazbin, they want to record in Los Angeles or New York because it’s a big project and we’re singing, but it always works out. They’re good about not scheduling me on a day I have a show, because it can be really taxing on my voice, especially in Hazbin Hotel, when we’re screaming and being crazy all the time.

I see on Instagram that you guys are jumping from convention to convention to meet fans. I did not realize how popular that show is.
Oh, it’s wild. Our brains are exploding. We’re like “How?” It’s not what I expected of my career or my animation career. I’m obviously taking a Con break to do Mystic Pizza, but the Cons have been fun, and I get to travel a lot.

I’m hoping it crosses new people into real, true Broadway musical-theater, because it’s all these animation fans and musical-theater fans that like the show. People are constantly telling me they didn’t think they liked musicals, but then Hazbin Hotel made them obsessed.

It must be nice to be able to do it with people that are your friends in real life, like Erika Henningsen.
Oh, what a gift. Me and Erika are best friends, and we still look at each other like “How did we book another job together?”

And there’s only one season currently, right?
We’re picked up through season four, and we’ve only had season one come out. We wrapped season two last February. You record the voices first and then everything gets animated. It takes some time. I’m sure we’ll be gearing up to record season three very soon.

Most important question: have you done a class field trip to the real Mystic Pizza yet?
We haven’t, but I went last year with my husband, Bob. We were kind of close to Mystic, Connecticut, so we checked it out and I toured the Mystic Pizza. It was so fun.