Shoshana Bean on Taking Only Smoke on Tour and Coming Home to The Lost Boys

It’s a very good time to be Shoshana Bean.

Three months ago, she won her first Tony Award for playing Lucy Emerson in The Lost Boys. In 2025, she picked up her first Grammy Award as a principal soloist on the cast recording of Hell’s Kitchen. She’s happily settled into life at the Palace Theatre with a Broadway company she adores. And now, for two week-long stretches this fall, she gets to take a break from eight shows a week and hit the road with Only Smoke, her seventh independent recording project.

Bean recently invited The Broadway Show to spend an afternoon with her, starting at Euphoria Studios, where she was rehearsing with her band, and ending in her dressing room at the Palace, where she prepared to take the stage that evening in The Lost Boys. Anyone who has experienced Bean in concert knows what a thrilling live performer she is, and Only Smoke, released late last year, gives her particularly rich material to bring to the stage. Personal, intimate and beautifully sung, it’s one of her best collections yet.

Bean had originally planned to spend 2026 touring and promoting it. Then The Lost Boys came along.

“My instinct was to say no,” she admitted. “I really wanted to focus on the music because this album was probably one of my favorite ones I’ve ever made and I wanted to give it a shot at being heard. And I thought, ‘What if I can do both?’”

The answer, happily, was yes. With the blessing of The Lost Boys producers, Bean will step away from the musical for those two week-long stretches, beginning September 13 in Nashville and continuing through cities including Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver and her hometown of Seattle.

Only Smoke grew out of the aftermath of a relationship that ended abruptly and sent Bean into a period of intense songwriting and self-examination. Written largely in Nashville while she was starring in Hell’s Kitchen, the album favors emotional transparency over the vocal fireworks long associated with Bean. “I don’t want to hide behind big singing,” she told People. “This needed to be the most transparent storytelling I’ve ever done.”

For the tour, Bean worked with legendary musician and producer Steve Jordan, who music-directed her acclaimed 2025 Carnegie Hall concert, to shape a 90-minute set highlighting Only Smoke, reaching back into her earlier music and perhaps sneaking in a theater song or two. She’s even learning guitar for the occasion.

“That’s a lot of years of music to try to slam into 90 minutes,” she said. “We’re finding the groove right now.”

And after each stretch of touring, Bean gets to return to a Broadway home she clearly loves. She calls the Palace “one of the happiest buildings I’ve ever been in” and lights up talking about the young company surrounding her.

“They revere this craft,” she said. “They are so grateful to be here. I just am so glad that the future of our industry is in these hands.”

There’s a satisfying full-circle quality to the moment. Looking back on the 2008 release of her first album, Superhero, Bean expressed gratitude that Broadway.com took her recording career seriously at a time when many in the theater industry saw making her own music as something of a detour from Broadway.

“Back then nobody wanted me to do anything but be on Broadway,” she said. “It was like, ‘This is fun. Get that out of your system and then when are you coming back?’”

Eighteen years later, Broadway.com followed her from rehearsal for album number seven to the Broadway dressing room where she now keeps her Tony Award alongside her Grammy.

“All of it happened how I dreamed and imagined, and none of it happened how I dreamed and imagined,” Bean said. “Some of it happened better than I could have ever dreamed and imagined.”

For now, there’s plenty to enjoy right here.

“I just feel really grateful,” she said. “There’s just an abundance of riches right now. I’m just enjoying it.”

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