Growing up in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood, being onstage came naturally for Kimber Elayne Sprawl. “I was always a performer,” she said in a recent Zoom interview with CityBeat. “As a family, we were active in dance together at the Arts Consortium with the Cincinnati Black Theatre Company. I knew right away I had a passion for the arts, and I wanted to be a performer for a living. I fell in love with musical theater there. I did The Wiz. I love to sing; I love to dance. It was just something that I gravitated toward.”
D’Andre Kamau Means, the Black Theatre Company’s director, encouraged her to audition for the Children’s Theatre of Cincinnati, a professional company that presents shows at the Taft Theatre for thousands of kids. By the seventh grade, Sprawl was enrolled at the Cincinnati Public School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA). She remembers, “There was never a time when I wasn’t writing or singing or being in a play.”
Following her 2010 SCPA graduation, she landed in the venerable musical theater program at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (CCM). “I had no idea how competitive it was,” she says. An SCPA friend was fixated on CCM, and she followed his lead, not fully realizing that fewer than 20 students were enrolled after hundreds of nationwide auditions. “For me, it just made sense. It was in my backyard. I didn’t look anywhere else. Sometimes that sort of blind confidence gets you places.”
At CCM, Sprawl refined her professional skills. “What I learned at CCM was discipline, knowing how to work my skill set, knowing exactly what I could do, how I can do it and the best ways to package it and present it. I was by no means the best or the favorite, but it’s a conservatory that really sets you up, lets you develop your tools and know how to use them.” Soon after her UC graduation in 2014, she performed in The Addams Family at the St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre (commonly called “The Muny”).
In 2017, she joined the national touring company of The Lion King. “It came at the right time for me, giving me time to figure out what kind of actor I wanted to be, what kind of part I wanted to play. The show requires a certain number of native African players, and they taught me the language and the music. They meditated with me. It was very spiritual. I left that tour closer to myself, closer to my roots. Lion King really gave me my sense of self as a Black woman.”
In 2015, Sprawl made her Broadway debut in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and was a replacement for Jane in A Bronx Tale in 2018. In 2020, she was cast in a key role in Girl from the North Country, which began its pandemic-interrupted Broadway run that year, then resumed in 2022. She played Marianne, the Black daughter of a white couple who ran a 1930s boarding house in Minnesota. That show convinced her that she could do more than musical theater. Working with a cast of serious actors, she says, “They just fed into me and taught me so much about what it means to study the craft. Bob Dylan was a genius. [Playwright] Conor McPherson was a genius. I really loved Marianne: She was this striking soul, she knew what she wanted but she didn’t know how to get there. That really resonated with me. It’s sad that we didn’t get the run that the show deserved, but I was very grateful for it.” It was recorded on video and distributed recently on PBS’s Great Performances series.
In 2023, she was cast as Nessarose in the long-running Wicked, the first Black woman to play the role. In 2024, she worked with Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon, on a Roundabout Theatre Company production of Samm-Art Williams’ Home. This year, Leon cast her in his staging of Shakespeare’s Othello alongside superstar Denzel Washington. She played Emilia, Desdemona’s lady in waiting, her first Shakespearean role. She was eager to learn from Washington, “to be able to work with him, to be able to see into his eyes and sort of shine with him, it was an unreal experience.” The Actors’ Equity Foundation honored her with its 2025 Joe A. Callaway Award for her performance.
Leon, a nurturing veteran director, mentored her. “Working with Kenny is almost like working with an uncle. He is so personable, so giving — he shares so many things about his life and his past. Emilia isn’t usually played by a woman of color. He really wanted the voice of the show to be a Black woman. At the end, when she is really upset [by Desdemona’s murder], I was afraid to go there because I didn’t want to be seen as this angry Black woman. He encouraged me to really open my voice. He made me feel like my anger was nuanced and believable.”
In October at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Sprawl will perform in Spunk, a musical with material adapted from celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. Sprawl’s career arc continues to ascend, but she hangs onto her Cincinnati roots with frequent visits to family — and to get a fix of her favorite Grippo’s Potato Chips.
To learn more about Kimber Elayne Sprawl, visit instagram.com/kimberelaynesprawl.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Aug. 6 print edition.
This article appears in Jul 23 – Aug 5, 2025.