Rachel Griffin, a musical theater composer who was raised in Springvale and now lives in New York City, has won a fellowship to the Dramatists Guild. submitted photo Neighbor
Rachel Griffin of Springvale, now living in New York City, was among 150 applicants for the coveted fellowship, which provides a nine-month intensive program that brings the 13 fellows together to develop full-length pieces by working with experienced theater professionals and mentors.
Griffin, a graduate of Sanford High School, studied music at the University of Southern Maine and now attends New York University.
She was a singer-songwriter in the pop-rock genre when, she said in a telephone interview from New York City earlier this week, she began gravitating toward musical theater.
She’s always gravitated toward music.
“I wrote music in my head when I was 5 years old,” she said. “I thought everybody did.”
As a youngster growing up in Springvale, Griffin played in a production of Annie at Lyric Music Theater in South Portland – as it turns out, the same time as actress and Portland native Anna Kendrick was in the show.
She was in the Sanford High School chorus, played the flute in the high school band and moved to The Big Apple five years ago.
“I got on a Greyhound bus with everything I could pack and a huge keyboard,” she said, after answering an ad from a family looking for a nanny.
“I started writing a musical on my phone on the subway when I was commuting to grad school, a project I was doing for myself, and it kept getting longer and longer,” Griffin said of a musical theater production she continues to hone. She submitted the play, called “We have Apples,” to a couple of venues, got some good feedback and was told to keep going with it, she said. She submitted the work to the Dramatists Guild as part of her application for the fellowship.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Griffin of the fellowship. “They nurture us along the way. It’s very exciting, and I am truly grateful.”
Griffin, who recently wrote a song for an internal campaign for Macy’s, and whose work has been performed at a number of New York venues, from the New Light Theater Company to Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Bitter End, to name a few, said writing musical theater gives her wider opportunities than other forms of musical expression. She can speak to social justice issues, she said – like mental illness, addressed in “We have Apples.”
“I am very inspired by the stories you can tell in that medium,” she said. “It’s my favorite way to communicate with the world.”
The Dramatist’s Guild of America was established 80 years ago, according to its website, and is the only professional association that advances the interests of playwrights, composers, lyricists and librettists. It has 7,200 members from beginning writers to those presented on Broadway, off- Broadway and in regional theater.
— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 (local call in Sanford) or 282-1535, ext. 327 or twells@journaltribune.com.
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