Kristin Chenoweth

• 1. Introduction

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  Kristin Chenoweth is 4 feet 11 inches tall, and as a child she sang a song about it. At the age of 12, she stood alone before the national conference of the Southern Baptist Convention and performed "Four Feet Eleven," an Evie song. Its chorus begins, "I'm only 4 feet 11, but I'm going to Heaven." The girl who sang it grew up to be an American actress and singer, born on the 24th of July 1968. She would win a Tony Award and an Emmy Award, and she would be nominated for many more. How does a gospel-singing child from Oklahoma end up with both? What did she walk away from in order to chase a life on the stage? And what happened when her career, her beliefs, and her health began pulling in different directions?

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• 2. Oklahoma Beginnings

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  When she was five days old, a baby named Kristi Dawn Chenoweth was adopted by Junie Smith Chenoweth and Jerry Morris Chenoweth. Both parents were chemical engineers from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. In her 2023 book I'm No Philosopher, but I Got Thoughts, she named her biological parents. They were the bassist Billy Ethridge, who was briefly a member of ZZ Top, and a woman she calls "Mama Lynn." Some sources spell his surname Etheridge, and he also played with The Chessmen. She eventually met her biological mother. She had long believed she was one quarter Cherokee, but genetic testing showed that she is 4 percent Native American.

  Broken Arrow Senior High School is where she first took part in school plays. After graduating, she enrolled at Oklahoma City University, where she joined the Gamma Phi Beta sorority. She earned a bachelor's degree in musical theatre in 1990 and a master's degree in opera performance in 1992. Her voice instructor and mentor there was Florence Birdwell. Chenoweth also entered beauty pageants, winning the title of Miss OCU and finishing as second runner-up in the Miss Oklahoma pageant in 1991. In 1992 she took part in a studio recording of The Most Happy Fella.

  While finishing her master's degree, she worked at the Lyric Theatre in Oklahoma City and other regional theatres. Her roles included June in Gypsy, Liesl in The Sound of Music, Fran in Promises, Promises, and Tuptim in The King and I. She also entered vocal competitions. At the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions, she was named "most promising up-and-coming singer." The prize was a full scholarship to the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia.

  Two weeks before classes began, she traveled to New York City to help a friend move. While she was there, she auditioned for the 1993 Paper Mill Playhouse production of the musical Animal Crackers. She won the part of Arabella Rittenhouse. She turned down the scholarship and stayed in New York, trading a path in opera for a career in musical theatre. The Paper Mill Playhouse run in 1993 was the first rung of a long climb toward Broadway.

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• 3. Broadway Breakthrough

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  In 1997, Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote that "Kristin Chenoweth's sob-prone ingenue is delightful." He was reviewing Moliere's farce Scapin at the Roundabout Theater Company, where she played Hyacinth. It was her first review in that newspaper. That same spring she made her Broadway debut as Precious McGuire in Steel Pier, a musical by Kander and Ebb. The part won her a Theatre World Award.

  A New Brain came in 1998, when she created roles in the original Lincoln Center Theater production of William Finn's musical. Ben Rimalower of Playbill wrote, "It's unlikely anyone will equal Kristin Chenoweth in the role of 'Nancy D., the waitress.'" That year she also reprised a regional role, Anne Draper, in the City Center Encores! concert staging of the Gershwin musical Strike Up the Band.

  Sally Brown, Charlie Brown's little sister, did not exist in the original production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Chenoweth played her in the 1999 Broadway revival and won both the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Later that year she starred in the short-lived comic play Epic Proportions. In February 2000 she played Daisy Gamble in the Encores! production of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

  In October 2003, after a tryout in San Francisco, she returned to Broadway as Glinda the Good Witch in Wicked. The performance earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Leading Actress in a Musical in 2004, along with Drama Desk and Drama League nominations. Her co-star Idina Menzel, who played Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, won the Tony. Rimalower later wrote that Chenoweth had set "the gold standard" for Glinda, "unquestionably and indelibly." She left the show on the 18th of July 2004, after nine months in the part. The Wicked cast album earned a Grammy Award in 2005, but by then she had headed west to Los Angeles.

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• 4. Stage Revivals

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  In May 2004, Chenoweth sang Cunegonde in the New York Philharmonic revival of Candide, directed by Lonny Price. PBS broadcast the production on Great Performances. It included the rarely sung duet "We Are Women," in which she shared the stage with Patti LuPone as the Old Lady.

  From December 2006 to March 2007, she starred on Broadway as Eve in a revival of The Apple Tree, following a 2005 Encores! presentation of the piece. Her co-stars were Brian d'Arcy James and her former fiancé Marc Kudisch. She received Drama Desk and Drama League nominations and hosted the 2007 Drama Desk Awards ceremony. Encores! kept calling her back. She played Female Star in Stairway to Paradise in 2007, and Music in the Air by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II in 2009 was her fifth Encores! production.

  The Metropolitan Opera had planned to cast her as Samira in John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles in 2010. In 2008 the company canceled the expensive production as the U.S. economy weakened. In 2009 she joined the rotating ensemble of Nora and Delia Ephron's Love, Loss, and What I Wore at the Westside Theater, off-Broadway.

  Promises, Promises opened on Broadway on the 25th of April 2010, with Chenoweth as Fran Kubelik opposite Sean Hayes. The songs "I Say a Little Prayer" and "A House Is Not a Home" were added so that she could sing them. The show closed on the 2nd of January 2011. She missed performances from the 29th of December 2010 to the 1st of January 2011 to give a New Year's Eve concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall. In 2011 she also played the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in a reading of the musical Rise.

  On the Twentieth Century brought her back to the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2015 as Lily Garland, opposite Peter Gallagher. It ran for a limited 22 weeks. Brantley called her work "one of the most virtuosic portraits in song ever on Broadway," noting a range from "jazz-baby brass to operatic silver." It earned her a third Tony nomination and another Drama Desk Award.

  In November 2023, she made a cameo as The Producer in Gutenberg! The Musical! She then co-produced The Queen of Versailles and starred as its title character, Jackie Siegel. Stephen Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics. The show premiered at the Colonial Theatre in Boston in 2024 and began performances at Broadway's St. James Theatre in October 2025.

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• 5. Television Roles

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  Thirteen episodes of Kristin were filmed in 2001, yet NBC aired only six before canceling the semi-autobiographical sitcom. Her earlier television work included a guest spot on LateLine, the short-lived series Paramour in 1999, and television films such as Annie, in which she played Lily St. Regis. In 2003 she played Marian opposite Matthew Broderick in a television film of The Music Man. She also guest-starred on Frasier, Baby Bob, Fillmore!, and Ugly Betty, and appeared several times as Mrs. Noodle on Sesame Street.

  In 2004 she began a recurring role on The West Wing as the media consultant Annabeth Schott. She had first been considered for the part of Ainsley Hayes, but she had already accepted Wicked. She stayed through the final two seasons, until 2006. She was twice nominated, with the cast, for Screen Actors Guild Awards.

  Olive Snook, in Pushing Daisies from 2007 to 2009, became her most decorated television part. She was nominated for an Emmy Award two years in a row and won in 2009 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. The series was canceled after two seasons. In 2009 she also voiced Miracle Grohe, a science teacher who does not believe in science, on the animated comedy Sit Down, Shut Up. That series lasted just thirteen episodes.

  April Rhodes on Glee was a former member of the glee club who never finished high school and ended up at rock bottom. Chenoweth began playing her in 2009. A review in USA Today said that if her presence meant hearing Chenoweth sing, the show could offer any explanation it liked. She won a Satellite Award for Outstanding Guest Star. She returned in 2010, again in 2011 in the episode "Rumours," and for the show's 100th episode in 2014. Emmy nominations followed in both 2010 and 2011.

  In 2011 she starred in an ABC pilot with a longer, saltier title that the network shortened to GCB. The series debuted in 2012 and lasted one season, and she generally sang a song in every episode. That year she also took a recurring role as the political reporter Peggy Byrne in the fourth season of The Good Wife. In 2013 and 2014 she appeared twice as Brittany Gold on Kirstie, and from 2014 to 2019 she voiced characters in five episodes of BoJack Horseman.

  In 2015 she played Maleficent in the Disney Channel movie Descendants. Entertainment Weekly said that she "stole much of the show." It drew the largest cable TV movie audience of 2015 to that date. That year she also co-hosted the 69th Tony Awards, which brought another Emmy nomination. She played Velma Von Tussle in NBC's Hairspray Live! in 2016 and Easter in the Starz series American Gods in 2017.

  In 2018 she took the main role of Lavinia Peck-Foster in Trial & Error, an eccentric heiress accused of murdering her husband, who hires Josh Segal and Associates to defend her. That October she hosted and sang in A Very Wicked Halloween, marking fifteen years of Wicked on Broadway. In 2020-2021 she hosted a six-episode Food Network competition show based on the game Candy Land. Menzel and Chenoweth hosted a PBS Wicked concert special in 2021. She also joined season 21 of The Voice as an advisor to Ariana Grande's team.

  In 2021 she appeared in the Apple TV+ musical comedy Schmigadoon! as the villainous Mildred Layton. The part earned her a nomination for the 2022 Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. In 2023 she returned for season two as Miss Codwell, the owner of an orphanage, which brought another Hollywood Critics Association TV Award nomination.

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• 6. Film and Animation

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  Patty, in Topa Topa Bluffs in 2002, was Chenoweth's first part in a theatrical film. A few years away from the screen followed. In 2005 she returned in Nora Ephron's version of Bewitched as Maria Kelly. In 2006 she played supporting roles in five films: The Pink Panther, RV, Running with Scissors, Deck the Halls, and Stranger Than Fiction. Most of her film work has been in character parts.

  On the 24th of February 2008, she stood in the Kodak Theatre at the 80th Academy Awards and sang "That's How You Know" from the film Enchanted. That year she also voiced Kilowatt, "a little charmer," in Space Chimps, and Rosetta the garden fairy in Tinker Bell. She repeated the Rosetta role in two sequels, Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure and Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue. In the holiday comedy Four Christmases, she played the sister of Reese Witherspoon's character.

  Into Temptation, an indie drama written and directed by Patrick Coyle, gave her a darker part in 2009. She played what a description of the film calls a "suicidal prostitute." It screened at the Newport Beach Film Festival and was later released on DVD. She filmed the Disney comedy You Again that year, and it was released in 2010. A reviewer called her "memorable" as Debra in the 2012 action comedy Hit and Run.

  In 2014 she voiced Gabi, a poisonous frog, in Rio 2, and played Mrs. Kemp in The Opposite Sex. The next year she appeared in the thriller The Boy Next Door and voiced the Sugar Plum Fairy in Strange Magic. In The Peanuts Movie, she was Fifi, Snoopy's love interest. She played Lorna Buchanan in Hard Sell in 2016. In 2017 she was Janet Krauss in Class Rank, Princess Skystar in My Little Pony: The Movie, and Abby the Mouse in The Star.

  Hallmark Channel's Countdown to Christmas used her in A Christmas Love Story in 2019. She voiced another mouse, Daisy, in The Witches in 2020, and was Aunt Susan in Holidate that year. In 2021 she played Bailey in National Champions. She played herself in a cameo in Bros in 2022. In the 2024 film version of Wicked, she and Menzel appeared as "Wiz-O-Mania" Superstars performing in the Emerald City. Netflix released the romantic comedy Our Little Secret, starring her and Lindsay Lohan, in November 2024. She sings the end credits song "Live Like That" in the 2025 animated film The King of Kings.

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• 7. The Voice Itself

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  Betty Boop is the comparison Chenoweth herself uses for her distinctive speaking voice. As a singer she is a classically trained coloratura soprano, able to reach the note F6, the F above high C. Her recording career began on stage cast albums: The Most Happy Fella in 1992, A New Brain in 1998, and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1999. She also sang on a studio cast recording of 110 in the Shade that year.

  Her debut solo album, Let Yourself Go, arrived in 2001 and gathered standards from the musicals of the 1930s. One track is a duet with Jason Alexander. Playbill's Rimalower called it "a joyous affair." The next year she performed songs from it for Lincoln Center's American Songbook series. In 2003 she gave a solo concert in London in the Divas at the Donmar series for director Sam Mendes. Her second album, As I Am, is a collection of spiritual songs that peaked at number 31 on the U.S. Christian Albums Chart. In 2004 she gave a concert at Carnegie Hall.

  On the 19th of January 2007, she sang Kristin Chenoweth Live At The Met, a solo concert at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She was only the third musical theatre star to give a solo concert there, after Barbara Cook and Yves Montand. A Lovely Way to Spend Christmas followed in 2008. It includes a duet with John Pizzarelli and traditional carols such as The Lord's Prayer. It remains her best-seller, reaching number 77 on the Billboard albums chart, number 7 on the holiday albums chart, and number 1 on the Heatseekers chart.

  Some Lessons Learned, a country-pop album, was recorded in August 2010 on her nights off from Promises, Promises. It was released on the 13th of September 2011. It includes songs by Diane Warren, Dolly Parton, and Hillary Scott of Lady Antebellum, and Chenoweth co-wrote two of them. Her first U.S. concert tour came in the summer of 2012. In 2013 she played the Sydney Opera House on an Australian tour.

  In 2014 she returned to Carnegie Hall with an autobiographical concert, The Evolution of a Soprano. She made her London solo concert debut at the Royal Albert Hall, where one reviewer gave five stars. On the 6th of October 2014, she joined Andrew Lippa's oratorio I Am Harvey Milk at Avery Fisher Hall. Her album Coming Home reached number 48 on the Billboard 200 that year. The Art of Elegance debuted at number 36 in 2016 and at number 1 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart. Its song "I'm a Fool to Want You" was nominated for a Grammy Award for its arrangements.

  In 2016 she gave a concert series at Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre called My Love Letter to Broadway, and in 2017 she played the London Palladium. For the Girls came out on the 27th of September 2019. It covers songs by female performers who influenced her, with guests including Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Jennifer Hudson, and Ariana Grande. She toured it with a run at the Nederlander Theatre from the 8th to the 17th of November 2019. Her second holiday album, Happiness Is Christmas, appeared in October 2021, and on the 13th of December 2021 she returned to the Metropolitan Opera House with Christmas at the Met.

  Parades and stadiums have been part of the picture too. With the cast of Wicked, she sang "One Short Day" in the 2003 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 2005 she sang "Oklahoma" from the "Oklahoma Rising" float, the first of three annual appearances marking the state's centennial in 2007. She was the star performer at the opening ceremony of the 2007 Tournament of Roses Parade. She has sung the national anthem at the 2010 New York Yankees home opener and at the NFC Conference Championship at Candlestick Park in January 2012. In 2013 she sang the closing number at the Oscars, "Here's to the Losers," with host Seth MacFarlane.

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• 8. Body, Faith, and Home

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  In July 2012, equipment on the set of The Good Wife struck Chenoweth. She suffered a skull fracture, a broken nose, spinal and rib injuries, and cracked teeth, and she soon left the show. She later said she regretted not taking legal action. She described enduring "hundreds of doctor appointments," "head-to-toe pain on a daily basis," anxiety, and depression. Less than four months later she was back on a concert stage in California. A reviewer wrote that her "range, timbre and versatility are in peak form," with "astonishing top notes."

  Ménière's disease, an inner-ear disorder, is a quieter and longer-running challenge. It can cause vertigo, headaches, and nausea. She has said that during some performances she leaned on her co-stars to keep her balance, and that the condition has made her miss shows.

  The New York Times reported that when she assured fans she supports gay rights, her Christian base was outraged, and she was disinvited from a Women of Faith conference in September 2005. She describes herself as a "non-judgmental, liberal Christian." To promote As I Am, she appeared on The 700 Club, which upset some of her gay fans. She later said she thought the "Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the world are scary" and that she regretted the appearance. Aaron Sorkin, whom she had dated, drew on these episodes for the character of Harriet Hayes in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

  In May 2010, she answered a Newsweek article by Ramin Setoodeh, an openly gay writer who doubted that openly gay actors could convincingly play straight characters. He had singled out her Promises, Promises co-star Sean Hayes. Chenoweth called the article "horrendously homophobic" and compared its view to the bullying gay youths face in high school. She argued that audiences "come to the theater to go on a journey." In 2016 she endorsed Hillary Clinton and sang in a "Fight Song" music video made for the Democratic National Convention.

  Her 2009 memoir, A Little Bit Wicked: Life, Love, and Faith in Stages, covers her adoption, her time in Wicked, and her years in Hollywood. In 2022 she published a picture book, What Will I Do for My Love Today? That year she also investigated, in the Hulu mini-series Keeper of the Ashes: The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders, the 1977 murders of three girls at a Girl Scout camp. She had been unable to attend that camp because of illness. She began dating the guitarist Josh Bryant of Backroad Anthem in 2018. They became engaged in 2021 and were married on the 2nd of September 2023.

  Honors keep pulling her back to Oklahoma. The University of North Carolina School of the Arts gave her an honorary doctorate in 2009, and Oklahoma City University followed in 2013. She entered the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 2010 and won the GLAAD Vanguard Award in 2011. In 2012 the Broken Arrow Performing Arts Center named its theatre the Kristin Chenoweth Theatre. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015. In 2025, at the Paycom Center in Oklahoma City, she sang the national anthem before Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

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