Days before his death, Josh Grisetti posted a photograph on Instagram. It showed the cast of a musical in Italy holding up a picture of him, a stand-in for the director who had suddenly left the production. Grisetti wrote that he had wept on the plane after departing the Trentino Music Festival for “personal reasons”, adding, in Spanish, “los pequeños gestos significan mucho cuando el corazón está herido” — small gestures mean a lot when the heart is hurting. The image, tender and improvised, now reads as a valediction.

On 10 July, Grisetti took his own life. The news was confirmed by his friend and former co-star Rob McClure, who had played his brother on stage in the Broadway hit ‘Something Rotten!’ and later served as best man at Grisetti’s wedding. McClure’s Instagram announcement — “just a cataclysmic loss” — was picked up by outlets from Los Angeles to Beirut, and the shock was immediate. Grisetti was 44, married to Mackenzie Perpich since 2020, and had spent two decades building a career that moved fluidly between the footlights and the classroom.

To American audiences, Grisetti was a familiar face from the fifth season of ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’, where he played comedy writer Ralph Emerson. On Broadway, he earned a Drama Desk nomination for the musical comedy ‘It Shoulda Been You’ and later stepped into the role of Nigel Bottom in ‘Something Rotten!’, a part he carried on a national tour. Off-Broadway, he appeared in ‘Rent’ and ‘Peter and the Starcatcher’. Yet his influence extended well beyond New York: he directed productions, authored a spiritual memoir, and, as head of the musical theatre programme at California State University, Fullerton, trained a generation of performers. Viewed from Latin America, where Spanish-language dailies in Mexico and Argentina led their entertainment sections with the story, the loss was framed as that of a versatile artist who had touched both the stage and the small screen.

Tributes cascaded from across the English-speaking theatre world. Rachel Zegler, Lea Salonga, Donna Murphy and Sierra Boggess were among those who praised his talent and his generosity as a teacher. Boggess described him as an exceptional artist whose spirit left a mark on everyone who knew him. In Italy, the Trentino Music Festival mourned a “loving and caring person” who was deeply dedicated to his students. The cast of ‘Legally Blonde’ had, in his absence, held his image aloft on opening night. It was a gesture that, in Grisetti’s own words, meant everything when the heart was hurting.