In July 2004, Kristin Chenoweth left Wicked, the show in which she had created the role of Glinda. On July 20, the actress who floated down in Glinda’s bubble at the Gershwin Theatre was Jennifer Laura Thompson. She played the part for the next ten months, and at the end of the season Broadway audiences voted her their favorite replacement of the year.
Seventeen years earlier, the tab room at the MIFA State Finals had written her down more briefly. The 1987 Dramatic Interpretation sheet recorded most of its competitors by initial and surname, and hers reads “J. Thompson, Birmingham Groves.” She was a senior, and she made the semifinal round, one of the last twelve in the event.
We have added her full name to the record.
Southfield and Groves
Thompson was born in Southfield in 1969 and graduated from Groves High School in 1987. Dramatic Interpretation, which she competed in that year, is the forensics event built around the scene: a student cuts a play down to a few minutes and makes a room of strangers believe it.
Three years behind her at Groves was Erin Dilly, who would reach the Dramatic Interpretation final at State twice and also go on to a Broadway career and a Tony nomination. The two overlapped for a year at Groves, and again for a year at the University of Michigan, where Thompson earned her BFA in musical theatre in 1991.
Broadway
She made her Broadway debut in 1998 as Ariel Moore, the preacher’s daughter in Footloose. Three years later she was Hope Cladwell, the earnest ingénue at the center of Urinetown. It earned her a Tony nomination for best leading actress in a musical in 2002.
Then came Glinda. After Wicked she played Diana in Lend Me a Tenor in 2010 and Eileen Evergreen in the original cast of Nice Work If You Can Get It in 2012. That July, for two weeks, the show’s leading lady was played by a fill-in while its star was away: Erin Dilly. Two Groves forensics alumnae, three years apart in school, had found their way into the same Broadway show.
Her biggest role came next. She originated Cynthia Murphy, a mother coming apart after the death of her son, in Dear Evan Hansen, from its world premiere at Arena Stage in Washington in 2015, through its run off-Broadway at Second Stage, to Broadway, where she played it from 2016 into 2019. The show won the Tony for best musical. Its cast album won the Grammy, and she shared it, along with a Daytime Emmy for the cast’s performance on television.
She has also appeared in five Encores! productions at City Center, sung with orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, and turned up on television in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Person of Interest and Elementary.
Two from Groves
It is a remarkable thing for one public high school to produce two Tony-nominated leading ladies three years apart, and more remarkable that both of them competed in the same forensics event. Groves is still at it: its team won the Class A state championship in 2017.
Dramatic Interpretation asks a teenager to find the truth in someone else’s hardest moment and hold a room with it for eight minutes. Thompson did that for Groves in 1987. For three years on Broadway she did it eight times a week.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
