She’s Movin’ Out
lauren pritchard bows on broadway to pursue solo career
A young girl from a small town in Tennessee travels to California and then to New York, finding success on Broadway but dreaming of a musical solo career—this certainly sounds like a conceivable back-story for the bohemian character of Ilse in Broadway’s hit musical Spring Awakening. But, in fact, it is Lauren Pritchard, the actress who portrays Ilse, who recently left the show to embark upon a solo career as a recording artist.
Pritchard is certainly no stranger to performance. She began participating in community theater because her cousin was involved and has been acting in shows since she was seven.
Her first show was Jack and the Beanstalk, in which playing the lead role required her to wear a little boy’s wig. “By the time I was 11 or 12, I had spent my life in dance classes, singing and doing plays,” Pritchard says. “I made a personal decision at that age that that was the only thing I wanted to do with my life.”
Growing up in what she describes as a “Bible-belt, sheltered, all-Baptist community” in Tennessee, Pritchard’s available repertoire of musical theater hardly strayed from the ordinary. Before coming to New York, her resume included such standard classics as Annie, The Sound of Music, The Music Man, and The Wizard of Oz. But anyone who’s heard anything at all about Spring Awakening—a boundary-pushing musical that covers just about every taboo from homosexuality to teen suicide—knows that the 2007 Tony Award Winner for Best Musical is a far cry from any standard musical theater.
When asked if any of her roles before Spring Awakening had been particularly good preparation for her turn as Ilse, Pritchard recounts portraying the blind and deaf Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker when she was nine years old. “It flipped me out completely,” she says, “but it was in that moment that I think I realized I really wanted to pursue this kind of in-depth love of what I’m doing. ... I had to learn sign language and it became fun for me. It was an in-depth way to play a character. That helped me when I had to do Spring Awakening and learn to get in touch with a piece itself and the character I was playing.”
Pritchard’s ability to take on different personas is not just limited to the stage. Before moving to New York, Pritchard found herself playing keyboard and singing backup vocals in a reggae band in California, a gig that she was forced to give up to join the cast of Spring Awakening.
Leaving the band was “a really tough decision,” she says, though she decided that she had to go nonetheless. “Some kind of higher power was telling me, ‘This band is not the thing for you, or else it would be working out. You need to go and do this show.’” Despite nerves and a second cross-country move in as many years, Pritchard made the jump. “I was definitely freaked out,” she says. As it turned out, though, Pritchard’s memorable role as Ilse in the award-showered show earned her tremendous praise. And, perhaps with some guidance from that same higher power, her Broadway debut brought her onto the radar of the people most valuable to aspiring singer-songwriters. After a series of promising meetings with industry insiders, Pritchard signed with Sony BMC, essentially taking the first steps toward a primarily music-oriented stage of her life. Working closely with manager Ron Shapiro and Spring Awakening composer Duncan Sheik, Pritchard is well on her way towards making an album that fulfills her goals.
“I want to make great music, and I want to have a big hand in it,” she recalls telling one of the producers from Sony BMG.
Ironically, although her voice is one of the most memorable parts of the show, Pritchard herself can’t stand it. “I can’t really stand to hear myself sing,” she says.
The passion to move from Broadway into a career as a solo artist is not a recent one. She draws inspiration from a number of artists, particularly Billy Joel, whom she considers to be “the greatest thing since sliced bread,” and performing as a solo artist has been an aspiration for several years. By the time she was 16, Pritchard had already realized that she “wanted to be a singer-songwriter more than anything else, even if it took a long time.”
But at the age of 19, it hasn’t taken her all that long to succeed. With a notable Broadway role already under her belt, Pritchard has accomplished more before her 20th birthday than many aspiring performers do in a lifetime.
The jump she’s about to make, however, isn’t an easy one. Without set show times or an entire cast supporting her, Pritchard fully realizes that a solo career will be a challenge compared to musicals. “I think it’s going to be just as hard and just as grueling, if not maybe more, simply because it’s just me,” says Pritchard. “I’m now the biggest part and the only part.” Everything depends on her, and, as a result, predicting when the first album will be out is no easy task.
“Sometime after Halloween, hopefully we’ll be on our way to putting something out. Could be longer, could be shorter, depends on the recording of the actual thing. I wish I could give a definite answer. It wont be in, like, four years,” she says.
While Pritchard spends her time in the recording studio, she plans to put Broadway on the back burner. “I think eventually it will be something I come back to—because I do love it—but hopefully not for a long time, until I feel like maybe I’ve fulfilled all of these singer-songwriter musical dreams.”