It’s been six weeks since Shoshana Bean took home her first Tony Award for her performance as Lucy Emerson in the Broadway spectacle The Lost Boys. And while many believed her Tony win was long overdue, the celebrated actress and vocalist wasn’t so sure it would actually happen.
“I’m used to losing,” Bean exclusively tells BroadwayWorld. “Winning is just not my thing. It’s just never been my thing. So I think I’m always prepared to lose. In fact, when [Megan Thee Stallion] started to open the envelope, I was like, ‘It’s not me.’ Then when she hesitated, I knew it was because she didn’t know how to say my name, and I [thought], ‘It’s me.’”
Bean, 48, has always been one to chart her own path. Throughout the years, she’s toggled between musical theater and her solo music, which often leans into her soul and R&B roots, but has said she spent the majority of her life feeling like she’s “too much” and often tried to “shape-shift” in order to find acceptance.
By the time Bean won the Tony, she had come to a place in her life where she didn’t necessarily need an award to tell her anything about her self-worth — it was just icing on the cake.
“It came when I had already validated myself, and that’s the only thing that matters,” she says. “I’m grateful to be at a point in my life where nothing outside of me is going to make me feel better about myself [or] is going to make me feel worse about myself. I think I’ve found a steadiness where it’s like: Celebrate me, drag me, love me, hate me. I’m on my center, and I have the direction in which I’m headed, and nothing outside of me is going to really affect that.”
The win has “changed everything and nothing all at the same time,” she says, adding that it “feels like a win for all of us.”
“It feels like a win for everyone who has felt unseen, uncelebrated, who has felt like, ‘F–k, I got to create all my own opportunities, and no one’s even seeing how hard I’m working,’” Bean adds. “That’s why I just kept saying, ‘We did it.’”
Tonys Sunday was a “whirlwind,” the actress says, calling it “one of the best nights of my life.” After the ceremony, she celebrated with her cast at the Lost Boys party, and then it was off to the Carlyle until the wee hours of the morning. “At a certain point as I was going to bed, I texted [costar] LJ [Benet], and I was like, ‘Bro, the sun is out,’” she says. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, fully saw the sunrise.’”
For numerous reasons, Bean’s star turn in The Lost Boys almost never came to fruition. Longtime friend Caissie Levy was originally set to play the role of Lucy before she exited the production to stay with Ragtime. Bean also says she had no intention of going back to Broadway to play a mother or be in a stage adaptation. However, there was something pulling her toward the project.
“Lost Boys has been really healing for me in a lot of ways personally, professionally,” Bean says, adding that playing Michael and Sam’s mom Lucy just “felt right.”
“For the first couple of weeks of starting to sing through the material, I couldn’t sing through any of Lucy’s songs without crying,” she says. “‘Wild’ is one of the greatest songs I’ve ever gotten to sing.”
Her first performance back at the Palace Theatre as a Tony Award winner was special, she says. The pressure was off, the press was over, and she was focused on the show. “I’ve been in a show when other people have won, and you get to come back and celebrate that, but I’d never done it for me,” she says. “It was thrilling.”
In September and October, Bean will take a short break from The Lost Boys to tour her latest album, Only Smoke. Continuing to juggle both theater work and solo music has been both gratifying and challenging, she says, but “I just wouldn’t want it any other way.”
“This year was supposed to be for promoting the album, and Lost Boys came out of nowhere,” Bean explains. “And I thought, ‘What if I can do both this year? What if I can find a way to lead this f–king massive hit on Broadway and also find a way to continue to amplify my album?”
The actress admits that she can’t just show up for eight shows a week without feeling inspired elsewhere. “It may be a function of being programmed that way because I had to — for so long — create my own opportunities,” she says, adding that her path feels “incredibly unique.”
“I spent a lot of years just really hating that’s how my life shook down,” she admits. “But now I can look back on that and just be really grateful and proud.”
Looking back on her younger self, Bean says she would just “tell her the same thing that people have been telling me my whole life, which is: Just be patient. I would tell her that time is not what she thinks it is. And I would just say it’s not going to look how you think it’s going to look — but it’s still going to taste pretty sweet.”
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