Tony-Nominated Broadway Star Says He Was Fired For Voicing Christian Beliefs, Now He’s Fighting Back For Everyone

For years after college, Broadway performer Chad Kimball enjoyed a charmed career. He arrived on the Great White Way fresh out of Boston Conservatory, encouraged to attend by a high school drama teacher who saw promise in him. Though tales of grueling Chorus Line-style auditions while waiting tables and praying for a big break abound, Kimball’s path to theater stardom was relatively smooth. Within the first week, he’d booked his first Broadway show.

“It was totally providential,” the 45-year-old tells me, then adds with a laugh, “It also shut down three weeks later.”

But through the next couple of decades, despite the waxing and waning that is par for the course in the theater business, he consistently landed roles on and off-Broadway in shows like Sweeney Todd, Godspell, Lennon, and the jukebox musical based on the Beach Boys discography, Good Vibrations. Finally, in 2010, his performance in the smash hit musical Memphis nabbed him a Tony nomination for Best Actor. Kimball lost, but the show won four awards that night — Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Orchestrations.

So in 2015, when the same producers and director asked him to originate a lead role in a new musical based on a group of 9/11 passengers who were stranded in a small town in Newfoundland, he immediately said yes. Why wouldn’t he? By then, he says, “They were like my family.”

Kimball and the rest of the team found nearly as much success with Come From Away as they did with Memphis. The show routinely played to standing-room only crowds and received multiple Tony nominations. Then, in a release similar to Disney Plus’ Hamilton, on September 10, Apple TV+ released a live stage recording of the production in honor of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Except, Kimball wasn’t in it.

Singing And Sneering

The pandemic hit many areas hard, but perhaps none harder than Broadway. Kimball and New York’s theater community were some of the first Americans struck with Covid early in 2020. He spent several weeks that March suffering from the virus. Though often quiet about his faith, his brush with serious illness prompted him to pray and speak about eternal things. On March 24, he posted a link to a sermon about peace in times of suffering on Instagram, saying, “All of our earthly pleasures — the things we rely on, our freedom, the things that help us

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