Fourteen years before Broadway banished Laura Osnes because she didn’t get the Covid-19 vaccine, a lot of people in the theater world resented her for the way she’d arrived there. She had dropped out of college and was performing at a dinner theater in Chanhassen, Minnesota, when her aunt told her about a television audition in Los Angeles. It was called Grease: You’re The One That I Want!, a reality show to cast a Broadway revival.
In March of 2007, Osnes won the lead role. She was 21 years old when she and her husband of three weeks, Nathan Johnson, arrived in New York City with a U-Haul.
Even before the show opened, it was an object of derision among the Broadway elite. “It seemed tacky and down-market,” remembered Adam Feldman, the longtime theater critic for Time Out New York and the president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. New York magazine referred to Osnes and her co-star as “test-tube babies,” adding that “not everyone on the Great White Way would be devastated if they fell on their bright young faces.”
When the show opened in August, Ben Brantley, the New York Times theater critic, wrote: “The message of this latest Grease is that anyone, famous or not, can star in a Broadway musical.”
Much of the criticism of the show had a subtext: The theater world is a guild. You need to put in your time going to auditions and waiting tables. You don’t show up with a moving van and a reality show trophy, and slide into a starring role.
Grease ran for 554 performances. Osnes never missed a show. After it closed, she landed the lead in South Pacific in 2009. “That was the thing that legitimized me in the Broadway community,” Osnes told me. “From there, I felt like I was one of them.”
By the time the pandemic arrived, she was a star. The once-skeptical critics loved her. “Laura Osnes brings a crystalline grace to the role of debutante Hope Harcourt,” wrote Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly of Osnes’s performance in the revival of Anything Goes.
“Laura Osnes as a performer has more spine than you expect,” Feldman told me. “Although she looks and sounds the part of a perfect Disney princess ingénue, there’s a spark in her. There’s this inner core of strength and inventiveness that she finds.”
It was an inner core she’d need later.
Osnes is 39 years old today and still performing, but when I interviewed people in the New York theater world, they mostly talked about her in the past tense.
“I loved working with Laura,” said Jim Caruso, the New York City music impresario who regularly booked Osnes’s cabaret show at the Birdland jazz club in Midtown. “She’s wildly talented and her concerts were exquisite and an absolute joy to present.”
“I love her deeply,” said Benjamin Rauhala, a musical director who toured with Osnes for a cabaret show. “I can tell you she is one of the best collaborators and friends I’ve ever been lucky enough to have, and I cherish every memory we made together.”
But few people wanted to talk about what came later. One former longtime collaborator mentioned “land mines” and “public perception” as reasons he couldn’t talk.
Some told me of occasional murmurs, even before everything went wrong, about her beliefs being outside the Broadway mainstream. While Osnes didn’t push her religion, it wasn’t a secret either. She spoke about her Christian faith at Brigham Young University in 2015 and in some magazine stories. But no one really cared. People just liked her.
On March 12, 2020, Broadway shut down. Osnes kept busy during the pandemic by teaching voice lessons over Zoom. That summer, with social justice overtaking theater-world social media, Osnes mostly focused on music.
“I didn’t care about politics,” she said of that time. “I’ll go so far as to say I was relatively uninformed because politics didn’t affect my life. I want to tell stories, and I want to sing and dance.”
But when some Broadway stars turned their Instagrams over to black performers to explain their experiences, Osnes joined that cause. She also posted about the importance of Covid tests and wearing masks.
By the summer of 2021, some theaters were planning productions—with rapidly changing rules rolled out to align with public health recommendations.
Guild Hall, a venue in the Hamptons, had brought on Susan Stroman to direct a one-night-only production of Crazy for You scheduled for August 29, 2021. Osnes had agreed to play a lead role. She was to receive a $500 honorarium for three days of work.
On June 30, Stroman emailed Osnes:
The Guild is requiring everyone to show their vaccination card. . . . I am sending a private email to everyone I have performing over those three days to ask about their vaccination status. Let me know asap. I will still love you no matter what! Have a beautiful day. Thanks. Xx Stro.
Later that day, Osnes replied:
Hey Stro! I so appreciate this respectful email and totally understand! I know it has become a very controversial subject and I’m in the minority within our NYC community, haha, but I am not currently vaccinated. May end up doing so down the line, but for the moment, Nate and I have decided to wait till we know a bit more. With the variants and resurgence, I get why Guild Hall is requiring it yet I’m very bummed to have to lose this particular gig for that reason. . . . Let me know if I can help or if you need any other info on my end. Lots of love! xoxo-Laura
Stroman replied:
Oh Laura, I am bummed, too. But, respect your decision. Thanks for letting me know. You know I love you and we will be together someday again! Xx Stro
It was a graceful handling of a potentially contentious matter.
And that, Osnes thought, was the end of it.
Except it wasn’t.
At the New York Post, Covid was covered in mercurial fashion. The paper railed against lockdowns on its front page and criticized vaccine mandates. It was thus an odd outlet to serve as the enforcer of liberal Broadway groupthink. But its Page Six section, once described by Post columnist Steve Cuozzo as “a meaner brand of gossip, and more personal,” wasn’t ideological.
Someone told a journalist at Page Six that Osnes wasn’t vaccinated. The two authors of the story that ultimately ran didn’t respond to interview requests. But Michael Riedel, a theater reporter who’d slammed her in 2007 as the “least attractive” of the contestants on the Grease reality show, also contributed intel to the article—and he was happy to talk.
He told me the tip the Post received struck him as “a dramatic story at the time when there was a lot of controversy.”
“You have to be forced to confess that you were vaccinated or not vaccinated. That struck me as a little Stalinist,” Riedel added.
Not that that was going to stop Page Six.
Osnes received a call from her agent telling her that the Post had “gotten wind” of her vaccination status—but the agent had little detail on what it planned to report. Osnes didn’t think her medical history belonged in Page Six, so she declined to comment.
“I didn’t care about politics,” Osnes said. “I’ll go so far as to say I was relatively uninformed because politics didn’t affect my life. I want to tell stories, and I want to sing and dance.”
The story that ran put the most salacious possible spin on things. A performer who had amicably withdrawn from a show was described by the Post as having been “fired,” adding that she “got the hook” after co-star Tony Yazbeck complained.
While neither Yazbeck nor Stroman responded to my request for an interview, Stroman emailed Osnes the day after the Post story ran:
I am so sorry that article was written. I don’t know how it happened. . . . Please know that I think you are an exceptional person and I think the world of your talent.
Yazbeck also texted her:
Hi Laura, It breaks my heart to see how this whole thing went down in the media. It was a total surprise to me. People look to create drama any way they can it seems. I’m sending you love and wish you only the best.
At that point in the pandemic, the theater world was fully aligned with the public health establishment in viewing the unvaccinated as a public danger. Performers, desperate to go back to work, saw universal vaccination as a panacea.
The reaction to the Post story from the Broadway community was immediate: The former princess was suddenly a villain.
Feldman, the theater critic who’d been such a fan, posted a link to the story, with the comment, “Buh-bye.”
In a follow-up post, he added that while she was a talented performer, she’d “been infected with the murderous-disregard-for-your- colleagues-and-society-in-general-virus.”
The influential OnStage Blog referred to Osnes’s vaccine decision as “one of the highest acts of selfishness you could do for this industry.” Others were even less kind. A theater lover on Instagram posted, “I fucking hate you Laura . . . I hope you never appear on a broadway stage again you fucking selfish bitch.”
Death threats poured in. People she’d thought of as friends attacked her on social media. Four bookings were immediately canceled—and other performers and producers said they didn’t want to work with her for fear that an association would suggest approval of her views.
“The most hurtful thing,” Osnes said, “was that people found out this one thing about me and the vaccine—and nothing else in my character or even my work mattered anymore. All these assumptions were made about who I was, and no one defended me.”
“You have to be forced to confess that you were vaccinated or not vaccinated. That struck me as a little Stalinist,” said theater reporter Michael Riedel.
A few days after the story ran, Page Six removed the suggestion that she had misled co-workers about her vaccination status. It also added a line noting that Guild Hall actually had a policy allowing unvaccinated performers to perform subject to regular testing. But in the confusion of rapidly shifting policies, Osnes had not been informed of that option. If the venue’s testing policy had been communicated to Osnes, she would have complied with it, performed in the show, and her vaccination status, like most people’s, never would have been made public.
But it was too late.
Eventually, Osnes would sue the Post. A settlement was reached but she was still an outcast on Broadway.
“The vase of my life was thrown on the ground and got shattered into a thousand pieces,” she remembered. “And I was just trying to put it back together and then quickly realized that wasn’t an option. I was on the floor for a year and a half.”
New York City no longer felt safe, and it didn’t offer work either. Osnes and her husband moved to Nashville in the fall of 2021. She has been working there ever since, appearing in cabaret shows and family-friendly Christmas movies.
Riedel didn’t follow the fallout at the Post. He asked me what kind of movies she’s making. I mentioned the Great American Family network. He laughed.
“Talk about a fate worse than death,” he said. “If that doesn’t convince you to get the vaccine, I don’t know what will.”
I asked him if he felt badly about what happened to Osnes.
“There wasn’t any animosity on my part,” Riedel said. “But honestly, I don’t really care. I let the chips fall where they may, and I move on to the next bit of gossip. I never really calculate those things. This is juicy, let’s put it in the paper. Whatever the repercussions are, I move on to the next hit job.”
In New York City, the void of Osnes’s disappearance was immediate and painful, with one actor I spoke with likening it to a death. Her ostracization couldn’t even be discussed, with any suggestion of sympathy for Osnes deemed possible grounds for cancellation.
Even now, four years later, people are still careful. When I asked Caruso, who had booked her show for years, what he thought of her fate, he said, “Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I respect that, but the way the situation was handled was unfortunate. It was a loss for all involved.”
When he was in Nashville to do his popular Cast Party cabaret show in late 2021, Osnes and Johnson went to see it. Caruso asked her to perform, and she did—which made her think that there might yet be some healing.
“He was so sweet,” Osnes remembered. “It felt like coming home.
“We were at the point where any ounce of kindness and humanity came as like the most wonderful drink of water that we had in the desert.”
More than four years after her exit from New York City, Osnes has only been back once—for six hours, during a stop for a cruise ship she was performing on.
“I got back to the safety of the boat and sailed away,” she said.
On a podcast last year, the critic Adam Feldman said he thought it was fair to wonder whether Osnes was treated fairly. When I spoke with him, he seemed certain she hadn’t been.
“Laura’s is a particularly bad case,” he said. “She was outed about a medical decision she was making. It wasn’t her choice. And people were willing to sacrifice her to the larger goal—which was universal vaccination. And if there are going to be sacrificial lambs, then it doesn’t matter who the lambs are. In some ways, the cuter the lamb the better, if you’re going to please the gods.”
When I suggested that this didn’t sound terribly scientific, he explained that Osnes was an outlier in the theater world at a time when people were terrified—about everything from dying of Covid to job security to culture wars.
“She became a symbol of a position,” Feldman said. “She absorbed all of these negative energies that were circulating around.”
That her actual conduct didn’t warrant the treatment she received, so obvious to Feldman now, was lost on the entire community at the time. For the crime of having her vaccination status leaked to a tabloid, she was robbed of her career and her New York life. To this day, Osnes hasn’t used her platform to broadcast her views on vaccines or politics.
No one I spoke to said Osnes shouldn’t be able to perform in New York again—but no one is rushing to make it happen. One former collaborator even suggested that maybe it’s better for everyone if Osnes stays in Nashville, where her values are more common.
I asked the actor Clifton Duncan, who once did a reading with her for a show about the life of Houdini, what he thought about that.
“I’m pissed off on her behalf to this day,” he said. Without allowing space for people like Osnes, he told me, the theater will be “a bunch of conformists and cowards.”
Osnes said she’d like to work in New York again, but only for the right role. She has had talks, but nothing has materialized. She told me she’s made a life in Nashville, that it’s a good life, and that she loves the community she’s found there. She tries not to dwell on what she lost on Broadway. She and Johnson were adamant that they don’t see themselves as tragic victims.
Still, sometimes they do miss the world they were in—the theatrical big leagues, with productions that can only take place in New York.
I asked Gianni Valenti, the owner of Birdland, the New York City club where Osnes often performed, about her.
“I have a personal friendship with her,” he said. “And what happened to her hurts me. We had a great relationship and then it just disappeared.”
Would Valenti book her again now?
“I’m certainly not going to be the first,” he said. “If she came to New York, and she was making headway, and there weren’t crazy emails and texts and all that, I would—but I’m not going to be the flagship.”
“It’s a cruel world,” he said. He paused. “The theater people are very, very vocal.”
“It’s very, very sad,” one former Osnes collaborator told me. “It’s been sad the whole time.”
First of all, the vaccine did not stop the transmission of COVID. It didn’t prevent you from getting it, or giving it to someone else. So if there is risk, which there is and was, there MUST BE CHOICE. Good for you @lauraosnes for trusting your gut, and not succumbing to the political pressure. We need more critical thinkers to pause and assess the potential outcomes when it comes to those who say “trust the science”. Don’t just take someone else’s word, and fall in line like a flock of sheep! 🐑
Awful time to be different, I thank god we live in the somewhat rural midwest where we didn't hear "listen to the science" every day. It is not lost on this reader that many of the same people who cheered on the government's shutdown and vaccine edicts are accusing the current administration of the same kind of behavior. I feel for her. It is hard enough to make a career in the arts. When fellow artists turn on you, well, to use the term from Saving Private Ryan, that is FUBAR!