Biography
Spencer Kayden was born in 1971 in Costa Mesa, California. Kayden grew up in Orange County, California and went on to study drama at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She joined the Chicago cast of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and moved to New York in 1993 to start the New York run of the show.
Kayden received critical acclaim and notice for her performance in the musical Urinetown, where she played Little Sally, the pig-tailed girl who helps explain the plot. She played in the 1999 New York International Fringe Festival production, and then was in the original Off-Broadway and Broadway casts in 2001 and returned in 2003. The CurtainUp reviewer noted in reviewing the Off-Broadway production: "But while Spencer Kayden does everything right in her portrayal of the droll little girl who alternates begging for 'penny for a pee' with Shirley Temple/Charlie McCarthy exchanges with the deceptively kindly neighborhood cop, her Sally is wrong. This 'bad' idea is outrageously good for lots of laughs. The central joke works."
It is from her theater performances that she was discovered by Fox executives and cast as a featured performer on MADtv.
Kayden also played the role of Mrs. Pepper in the popular Nickelodeon kids series Blue's Clues.
Kayden starred in the farce Don't Dress for Dinner at the Royal George Theatre, Chicago, Illinois, from November 2008 to January 2009. She reprised her role as the cook in the Broadway production, which opened in March 2012 at the American Airlines Theatre.
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)