NEW YORK – Rob McClure heard the news the way anyone in the theater hears the worst kind: suddenly, without warning, without any way to prepare. “Some of my all-time favorite memories,” he wrote of his Something Rotten! co-star Josh Grisetti, “were by this man’s side, playing his brother onstage for years.” They had been brothers eight times a week for the run of a hit Broadway musical, and that kind of proximity either ends or deepens into something that outlasts the closing night party. For McClure, it was the second kind. He lost that person on July 10, 2026.
Grisetti, who was 44, died by suicide. His passing was confirmed by co-stars and friends who shared the news on social media, and it came days after he had quietly stepped away from a staging he was directing at the Trentino Music Festival in Italy – a production of Legally Blonde that he had wished the cast well on, citing personal reasons, before opening night arrived without him.
In 25 years of working in musical theater, Grisetti built a reputation that was hard to reduce to a single role. He was Nigel Bottom in the original Broadway cast of Something Rotten!, the comedic musical that ran from 2015 to 2017 and earned him the kind of notices that stick to a name for a career. He was in the cast of It Shoulda Been You, Broadway Bound, Peter and the Starcatcher, Rent, and a Theatre World Award-winning turn in Enter Laughing. He appeared on Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the show that brought Broadway into the living rooms of people who had never seen a curtain call. He was, by every account, the kind of actor other actors wanted to work with.
He was also an educator. At California State University, Fullerton, Grisetti served as Associate Professor and head of the BFA Musical Theatre program – a role that put him in front of the next generation of performers in a discipline that asks enormous things of the people who study it. His students there did not just learn from a working actor; they learned from someone still testing the shape of a stage career at its midpoint, someone who had moved from performing to directing without fully leaving either behind.
That transition was visible in Italy. Grisetti had arrived at the Trentino Music Festival to direct Legally Blonde, a show that demands everything of its director – comic timing, physical staging, a genuine warmth that the material needs to work. He was weeks into the production. Then, days before the company was set to open, he posted a message to the cast wishing them well and explaining he was stepping away for personal reasons. He did not explain further. The cast opened without him. He died four days later.
Sierra Boggess, his It Shoulda Been You co-star, offered language that resisted easy elegy. “He created light and thought and humor everywhere he went,” she said in a tribute that circulated widely among theater people in the days after his death. What Boggess described – that combination of intellectual energy and warmth – is the thing Broadway mourns most readily, because it is the thing hardest to replace. Technique can be studied. Comic timing can be developed. The quality Boggess pointed to is the rarer thing.
The Broadway community’s grief landed with the particular weight that comes when someone dies at a moment of creative expansion rather than decline. Grisetti was not receding from theater; he was reaching into a new dimension of it. The move from performing to directing is not a retirement – it is, if done seriously, the beginning of a different kind of ambition. And his academic role at Cal State Fullerton placed him in a position to shape what the next 20 years of American musical theater might look like, not through his own performances, but through the students he trained.
What is not known is what was happening in Grisetti’s life in the days before he left the Trentino production. His message to the cast gave no indication of distress – or rather, it gave no indication that the people reading it recognized as such. The gap between public performance and private experience is not unique to performers, but it is perhaps sharpest in a profession that trains people to project feelings they may or may not have. Grisetti was, by all accounts, someone who projected light. The record does not reach behind that projection.
He is survived by his wife, Mackenzie Grisetti. Broadway’s larger community of performers, directors, and educators is working through the kind of loss that arrives without explanation and resists the framing that makes loss manageable. Broadway icon Patti LuPone, currently making international news of her own, represents a generation of theater artists whose commitment to the stage shaped what Grisetti grew up wanting to do. He did it. And then, at 44, with Legally Blonde not yet opened and Cal State Fullerton not yet reached its August semester, he was gone.
Entertainment Weekly and Deadline confirmed his death and the cause. Colleagues across the theater industry have continued to share tributes on social media, a form of public mourning that the theater community has adopted as naturally as curtain calls.
The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at 988 for anyone experiencing thoughts of suicide or in crisis. Additional resources are available at 988lifeline.org.
