Jessica Vosk Talks Career Risks, Resilience and Originating Her First Role in Beaches

Jessica Vosk is no stranger to Broadway, but her star turn as Cee Cee Bloom in Beaches represents a meaningful first in a career already filled with standout performances. In conversation with The Broadway Show host Tamsen Fadal, Vosk reflects on the unpredictable rhythm of life between productions, the rare opportunity to originate a role and the personal journey that brought her to this moment.

Beaches is Vosk’s sixth Broadway show. She comes to the new musical after most recently replacing the role of Jersey, originated by Shoshana Bean in the Alicia Keys coming-of-age musical Hell’s Kitchen. The physical closeness of moving from the Shubert Theatre to the Majestic only added to the surreal nature of the shift. “I finished Hell's Kitchen in December of 2025, and now, I'm here a couple of months later,” Vosk says. “It's this incredible thing to look down the street and go, ‘Whoa, I just came from there, and now, I get to be over here.’ It's beautiful.”

Once she finished her performances in Hell’s Kitchen, Vosk had planned for rest and personal time. “I had no idea that [Beaches] was coming. I was done with Hell's Kitchen, and thought, ‘All I need to do is go to bed, get married, maybe. That's it.’” Vosk’s vision changed quickly. “The phone call came maybe a month later, out of the blue, from the producer of Beaches, and she said, ‘We have a Broadway theater.’”

Out went her dreams for a spa day, and in came the dream of originating a role. “You're not necessarily allowed to come in and make something your own, which is understandable,” Vosk says of her previous experience replacing roles. This time, it’s different. “In a show like this, this is really the first time where I've gotten to call the shots with the acting, singing, the keys of songs, jokes and all of this stuff that I've never gotten to do before.”

Out of all the roles that Vosk could originate, Cee Cee Bloom holds particular personal significance. “I think everyone knows Beaches from the film with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. It is iconic. Bette Midler, for me, is who I pray to,” Vosk says. “Cee Cee Bloom is known as, I think, a tough broad—but also a bit of a teddy bear underneath—who relies on humor to get her through. She loves to sing, she loves to make people happy, she relies on her fans to get her through. All understandable, and really parallels a lot of what I've been through in my life.”

Beyond the character, the story itself resonates due to the realism conveyed; a broader shift Vosk is eager to see more of on stage. “One of my largest little soapbox moments is women's rights, and in addition to allyship with gay rights, women's rights is really important to me,” she says. “I think the audience for a show like Beaches and an audience for something that is so centered around women unapologetically is something that we need right now.” Her hope is that audiences leave the theater feeling personally connected to what they’ve seen. “I want women to feel like they can come into the theater, watch a story, have us take them on a journey, and then leave going, ‘Oh, my God, I should call my best friend.’”

Vosk herself has been on quite a journey, taking an unconventional path to follow her dreams. “I did not go to school for musical theater. I went for communications and investor relations, and I wound up working at an investor relations firm in Manhattan. My life was down on Wall Street for about two-and-a-half years,” she says. Though successful, she felt unfulfilled. “I was pretty great at my job. I just didn't love it, and it manifested in ways that I didn't understand at the time, anxiety and stress and panic attacks… because I refused to sing. I bottled everything.”

Leaving that career behind required some wind beneath her wings. “When I decided to leave that job and do the massive pivot, I had no idea what I was doing,” Vosk admits. “The road that followed was anything but easy. “I would stand in line at auditions for hours, not necessarily being able to get in and be seen, and it took a lot of blood, sweat, tears and babysitting other people's children to make that happen.” Even now, she remains candid about the realities of the industry. “I think about all the things that you do for free and the times you show up and just want people to see you sing. It's really hard. I always say that when you want to be in this business, you really need to love it and be so entrenched in what this is. Otherwise, it's not worth it. It's too hard.”

That difficulty has only grown in the age of social media, but Vosk embraces transparency. “I'm a big social media advocate for showing people what it's like to be on Broadway: the good, bad and ugly,” she says. “But critics are a thing, and the masses are now critics. And that can be hard.” Through it all, her sense of purpose remains clear, defining “the why of this business” for her as serving as an example for young girls. “The glam is cool, the red carpets are cool, the fun flights to cool concerts are amazing, but it's the changing of lives, for me, that I care about the most, truly.”

Watch the full interview below.

Get tickets to Beaches!