The Dallas Morning News Lawson Taitte Column: Kimberly Grigsby Brings Broadway Passion to SMU
By Lawson Taitte, The Dallas Morning News
Mar. 8–Normally Kimberly Grigsby is in charge of the music in Broadway’s latest Tony Award-winning musical, Spring Awakening — playing keyboards and conducting the performances, after years of training the singers and musicians. For the last two weeks, though, she has been teaching a couple of the show’s biggest songs to Southern Methodist University students.
The most famous, with lyrics and a title we can’t print here, has the 14 young people clustered around Ms. Grigsby in the Bob Hope Theatre. She’s trying to get them to loosen up and give the song the aggressive edge it needs.
“Don’t apologize for your art!” she commands. “It’s raw and it’s young and it’s strong and it’s angry. Imagine there’s this rock band behind you — it should be inside you! Together, as a group, you have even more power. It frightens me, really. I’m afraid of mobs.”
Soon the master class — seven from the SMU opera department, seven from the theater division (the school doesn’t have a musical theater program as such) — is prowling menacingly and jumping and singing its heart out. Clearly Ms. Grigsby could make quite a career as a teacher if she ever left Broadway.
During her two weeks at SMU, she also coached individual students to sing theatrical songs as if they were living them. Each one would have to speak the song as well as sing it. In Ms. Grigsby’s world, everything comes from the power of the word and the emotions of the character.
“Making them speak the words sounds obsessive, but it’s not,” the musician says. “If I ask them to speak it, they all realize that the music comes from the same place. The intention should be the same.”
Of course, as the musical director of Spring Awakening, she’s already teaching the score and the composer’s intentions to professionals. She has been either musical director, musical supervisor or conductor for some of the best shows in recent theatrical history, including The Full Monty; Caroline, or Change; The Light in the Piazza; and the new Grease revival.
Ms. Grigsby was working on the Great White Way only seven years after graduating from SMU herself. She was undoubtedly one of the youngest musical directors ever on Broadway, and is still one of relatively few women in the job.
In college, she majored in piano and accompanied the chorus led by the late SMU legend Lloyd Pfautsch. Later she went to the Manhattan School of Music for a graduate degree in opera accompanying, but realized after working at a summer musical camp that her heart was really in musical theater.
Asked what Mr. Pfautsch (who trained many a church choral director in his day) would have thought of her students singing a song called “Totally [expletive],” Ms. Grigsby says, ” ‘I understand every word,’ is what he’d say. In Spring Awakening on Broadway, all that vocal purity, all those consonants, come from Lloyd Pfautsch.”
Shortly before coming back to Dallas, Ms. Grigsby had been to London to prepare for Spring Awakening’s upcoming opening there. She’s also getting the touring version set to go on the road.
In London, she actually got to go out to the theater. Working eight shows a week in New York, she almost never has the opportunity. “Oh yeah. This is what we do, I said to myself,” she says. “It was fun.”
To watch her in action, Ms. Grigsby seems to get just as big a kick out of working for hours and hours with college students.
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