Gabrielle Beckford, Harper Miles and More to Star in CHASING GRACE at SheNYC ARTS

SheNYC ARTS is presenting the World Premiere of Elizabeth Addison’s new musical, Chasing Grace, starring Gabrielle Beckford (Once Upon A One More Time) and Harper Miles (Caroline or, Change) with music direction by Jacinth Greywoode. CHASING GRACE will play a three-week limited engagement at Off Broadway’s ART/NY Mezzanine Theatre. Performances begin Thursday, March 12th, 2026, and continue through Sunday, March 29th. 

Moving fluidly between a treatment facility, memory, and the rehearsal room, Chasing Grace is a meta-musical about recovery, authorship, and the cost of telling the truth out loud. With a score blending contemporary musical theatre, pop, and R&B, the show holds space for grief, rage, joy, absurdity, and hard-won laughter, capturing the lived reality of women navigating addiction, healing, and self-definition.

The show follows a writer as she sorts through the memories of her time in early recovery inside a women's treatment facility, where survival meant learning how to stay, how to listen, and how not to run. As the writer shapes her treatment experience into a new musical, memory and rehearsal collide. The women she once lived beside reappear, not as cautionary tales, but as full, complex human beings whose stories demand dignity, humor, and care.

As the musical's workshops succeed and industry attention grows, the writer is pulled into a familiar danger zone: external validation, creative compromise, and the seductive belief that success will finally make her feel whole. Pressure mounts to reshape the story into something more “palatable,” more marketable, and less honest. The farther she moves from the truth of her recovery, the closer she comes to losing it.

Inspired by author Elizabeth Addison’s time in treatment and chasing her own Broadway dreams with her first musical, Chasing Grace examines recovery not as a fixed destination, but as an ongoing practice, one shaped by community, memory, perseverance, accountability, and choice. At its core, Chasing Grace asks, what happens when you stop chasing the idea of grace and start learning how to live inside it?
 
The production stars Gabrielle Beckford (Once Upon A One More Time) as The Writer, LaDonna Burns (Rent National Tour) as Ms. Caroline, Chantelle Guido (Clue: On Stage dir. Hunter Foster) as Magical Why Tee/Ms. Anita/Ms. Amber, Tracey Conyer Lee (Chicken & Biscuits Asolo Rep) as Tessa, Theo Michaela (Be More Chill, Chicago) as Kelsey/Resident, Harper Miles (Caroline or, Change) as Grace, Marlaina Powell (The Lion King, Broadway) as Taniesha, Shamiea Thompson (The Color Purple Ritz Theatre Co) as Cece/The Black Tony Award Winning Writer/Director of Stage and Screen, Kiara Wade (Make Me A Song dir. Jessica Bashline) as Sheri/Janessa, and Whitney McIntosh-Joseph (“Law & Order: SVU”) as Understudy 2 for Tanisha, Tessa, Cece, Indya Cherise (Dreamgirls White Plains Performing Arts) as Understudy for Grace, The Writer, Janessa/Sheri.