Shoshana Bean
Shoshana Bean · Arts & Literature
Broadway actress and singer-songwriter; succeeded Idina Menzel as Elphaba in Wicked and won the 2026 Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for The Lost Boys
1 September 1977, Olympia, Washington, United States
Olympia · Portland · Cincinnati · New York
Shoshana Bean is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Broadway actress and singer-songwriter; succeeded Idina Menzel as Elphaba in Wicked and won the 2026 Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for The Lost Boys
Origins and early life
Shoshana Bean was born in Olympia, Washington, on 1 September 1977, the daughter of Jeff Bean and of Felice Moskowitz, a dance teacher, and at nine she moved with her mother to the Portland area, where her grandparents had settled in 1955. She was raised in what she calls a relatively conservative Jewish family, which required her to go to Hebrew school until her bat mitzvah, spent a few summers at a Jewish camp, and says that her Judaism is part of her whether or not she is practising.
Her mother is the daughter of Ed Moskowitz, an Ashkenazi Jew from the Bronx, and of Sylvia, a Sephardic Jew whose parents came from the Greek island of Rhodes and spoke mostly Ladino, and at the family's Portland synagogue, now Neveh Shalom, she led the Viddui, the Yom Kippur confession, for several years.
Work and career
After a musical theatre degree from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 1999, she made her Broadway debut in 2002 as Shelley in the original cast of Hairspray. Standby to Idina Menzel as Elphaba in Wicked, she succeeded her in the role on 11 January 2005, played it on Broadway for a year and then took it on the first national tour in 2006. She also built a career as a singer and songwriter, releasing her first album, Superhero, on her own label in 2008, and in 2019 she returned to Broadway as Jenna in Waitress.
Her performances in Mr Saturday Night in 2022 and Hell's Kitchen in 2024 each brought her a Tony nomination, and the Hell's Kitchen cast album, on which she is a principal vocalist, won the Grammy for best musical theater album in 2025. On 7 June 2026, at her third nomination, she won the Tony for best featured actress in a musical as Lucy Emerson, the single mother of two brothers in The Lost Boys. She dedicated it to every woman who ever felt she was too much or not enough, and urged them not to wait for permission to be all of who they are.
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Source: Wikipedia — Shoshana Bean
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Broadway actress and singer-songwriter; succeeded Idina Menzel as Elphaba in Wicked and won the 2026 Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for The Lost Boys
Source: Wikipedia — Shoshana Bean
