By Denny Patterson

The Gay Men’s Chorus of South Florida (GMCSF) is returning Sunday, December 18, 2022, at 7PM for its sixth holiday performance at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood. Led by Artistic Director Gabe Salazar, the yearly tradition will include classics such as “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “Silent Night,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and many more.

Accompanying the chorus this year is Tony & Grammy Award Nominee and Billboard Chart Topping Recording Artist, Shoshana Bean, who was most recently seen opposite Billy Crystal in Mr. Saturday Night as Susan Young. The role earned her a Tony Award nomination, and Bean now joins an all-star list of featured GMCSF guest artists, which include Jordin Sparks, Matthew Morrison, Alan Cumming, Linda Eder, and Liz Calloway.

Making her Broadway debut in the original cast of Hairspray, Bean has gone on to have a successful career and previously starred as Elphaba in Wicked and Jenna in Waitress. In music, she has created six independent studio albums and EPs, which have landed her on top of the iTunes and Billboard charts, and she has performed around the globe and lent her voice to countless films and television shows.

Bean took some time to talk more about the upcoming GMCSF concert, her career, and her love for the holidays with OutClique. 

Denny Patterson: Hi, Shoshana! Thank you for taking some time to chat with me. How excited are you to perform with the Gay Men’s Chorus of South Florida for their holiday concert?

Shoshana Bean: Very excited! I love gay men, I love gay men’s choruses, and I love Christmas.

DP: Is this your first time performing with a gay men’s chorus?

SB: No, I’ve had the good fortune of singing with quite a few around the nation. Most notably New York and LA, so I’m excited to expand my gay men’s chorus repertoire. 

DP: What are you looking forward to the most about this particular concert?

SB: Oh, man. I just have a very special place in my heart for Christmas/holiday concerts in general. It’s a special, special time of the year, and I think it’s a time of year when people are nostalgic, reflective, and more than any other time during the year, love coming together, connecting, celebrating, and being lovely to one another. The season and the mood that it evokes in people. The thing I love about gay men’s choruses, from city to city, the one thing that doesn’t vary is how much love is in the room. How much support for one another there is and how much community is in the room. It never fails to move me, and I’m humble to be welcomed into that and be a part of it. So, I just look forward to that feeling of community.

DP: Do you have a Christmas song or carol that is your absolute favorite to perform? 

SB: “O Holy Night.” It has always felt reverent and holy, like a prayer. It feels sacred, and this is going to sound ridiculous, but there’s something about the minor changes in the bridge. It bridges the gap for me because a lot of Hebrew prayers and songs sung in synagogue, the traditions that we have, all our stuff is minor. Everything’s always in a very minor progression and key, so in a way, it kind of felt like home. It has always been my favorite. 

DP: How do you normally spend the holidays? Do you try to take some time off, or are you usually working?

SB: I’m usually forced to take time off because the world shuts down (laughs). I would love to work straight through the holidays. But yeah, I usually spend time with family or take some kind of vacation. When I was younger and lived with my parents, they were not big holiday celebrators. We would go to friends’ houses or whatever, but we were Jewish, and there was very little you could do to decorate and really celebrate, especially in comparison to Christmas. Now that I’m older and obviously independent, I get to create my own traditions, have my own holiday gatherings, and decorate as I see fit. I just love indulging in every corny bit of the season.  From ice skating to window shopping, I love all of it. 

DP: What are some of the traditions you have started?

SB: My holiday show, this will be the first year we don’t do it, but that was going for four or five years straight. Then I have another friend who is just as obsessed with Christmas as I am. So, we’ll walk through Central Park late at night drinking hot cocoa, go to the Rockettes show, or go to this restaurant called Rolf’s, where it looks like you’re on the inside of a decorated Christmas tree 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long. It’s extraordinary. I used to have a little wine and cheese night for my closest girls, we would always do that around the holidays, but we’re all spread out now. 

DP: Do you have a most cherished holiday memory?

SB: Now they’re around the Christmas shows, but when I was younger, because we were Jewish, we would go spend Christmas with my mom’s best friends. We’d spend Christmas Eve night with them and wake up on Christmas morning. Because my parents were divorced, I’m an only child, and Jewish, we would do like one night of Hanukkah with my cousins, but just knowing that the rest of the world is taking a pause, being able to be with people you love, eat, watch movies, and cuddle it’s just the coziest, most connected beautiful time. I think those are my most special memories with my mom and her two best friends. The sort of two-day event it would become. One of them even ended up getting married on Christmas Eve. So, I do miss those days.

DP: In addition to singing and songwriting, you’re also an acclaimed stage actress. Have you always had a passion for entertaining?

SB: I guess so. I don’t know if it was entertaining in a sense of, what can I do to get a reaction from you? I recently worked with Billy Crystal and he always tells the story of how he watched these comedians on TV and saw the reaction that the audience gave them. He said he wanted to make people do that, and then he started messing around in his living room and was like, I like that I was making people feel something. I don’t think that was it for me in the beginning. Now that I’m older, I can understand the exchange of energy and what it is we do in a space together as creatives and an audience, how we create together and how important that is. When I was younger, it was innately in me to turn on music, dance, sing, change clothes and costumes, and boss people around. It was just in me to perform. Like, it needed to come out of me, but when I was younger, I actually didn’t like that everyone’s eyes were on me. When I would audition for stuff, I would freeze up and become paralyzed. Performing to me, it wasn’t private by any means, but it was performative. It was just expression. So, wanting to express myself was always, always, always in me. Wanting to be an entertainer came later once I was on stage and performing. I was learning more about the community of people and the fun stuff we got to create. It wasn’t until way later when I realized I wanted to make people feel something. 

DP: I’m glad you mentioned Billy Crystal because that was my next question. You starred opposite him in Broadway’s Mr. Saturday Night, and that was the first role you originated. What was it like working with Billy, and what did you take away from that experience?

SB: Oh my God, I’ve taken away so much from that experience. Every new experience, if you’re lucky enough, it’s just so expansive because it’s so new and uncomfortable. It’s new territory. So, moving through all those challenges taught me more about myself. It gave me more confidence in every aspect of being a performer, actress, musician, and comedian. I learned so much from Billy about timing, intention, and storytelling. Being in the room with Billy and the other two book writers was such a treat. Watching them work through scenes and dialogue, refining it and tweaking it, it was like watching a scientist solve problems. It was kind of similar in how I approach music, so it was an interesting way to treat dialogue, scene work, writing, and dramaturgy. Watching Billy with comedy and text is how I am with music, so I realized how musical text and comedy can be and is when it’s well-written and well-intentioned. It was honestly the quickest lifetime in one experience (laughs). We started in February and ended in September, so barely eight months, but it was the fastest, most revelatory lifetime in that tiny span. The gifts were and continue to be plentiful. 

DP: What are some other future goals you hope to accomplish with your career?

SB: I want to keep moving into spaces that are uncomfortable, so I think for me right now, that’s more TV and film because it’s not someplace where I’ve spent a ton of time. I’m anxious and excited to get into more spaces like how Mr. Saturday Night was. I totally feel out of my league here and I’m not really sure where I’m going, but you kind of have to figure out how to swim, or else you’ll sink. It’s in figuring out how to swim that lights me up. I really enjoy the challenge in that process, so I want to keep being in those kinds of spaces. I also love being able to tour to different cities and do concerts with new and different people, and I’d love to make more music and albums.

DP: What does the rest of 2022 look like for you right now?

SB: It looks pretty mellow. There’s a couple spa dates here and there and some vacationing, but I’m trying to make sure that the space and time that I have is not filled up with social things so I can actually take the space and time to recalibrate, get quiet, fill my tank, and figure out what I want to create next. 

DP: Before we wrap up, are there any other upcoming projects or anything else you would like to mention or plug?

SB: I believe sometime in December, they haven’t given us an exact date, but we filmed Mr. Saturday Night, and it will be streaming on Broadway HD. I talked to Billy and he’s very excited about the way it was edited. It’s weird sometimes when you film a stage production because it doesn’t translate all the time, but I think because it was basically a play with music and it was very cinematic in its theatricality, and Billy is also a TV and film director, he feels like it’s very intimate and thinks it was shot well enough. I’m excited about that.