Lena Hall

Lena Hall, born Celina Consuela Gabriella Carvajal on January 30, 1980, in San Francisco, California, is an American actress and singer whose Broadway career has spanned from 1999 to 2016. She is the daughter of Carlos Carvajal, a ballet dancer, choreographer, and co-artistic director of the annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, and Carolyn Carvajal, a former prima ballerina who became a yogi master. Hall has Swedish, Spanish, and Filipino ancestry; her paternal grandfather emigrated from the Philippines to San Francisco in 1926, and her paternal grandmother is Swedish. Her sister, Calliope "Calli" Carvajal, works as a hair stylist. At the age of seven, Hall sang for Pope John Paul II at Candlestick Park in San Francisco before an audience of more than 50,000 people. She later attended Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, where she studied dance, and was also an alumna of the Young People's Teen Musical Theatre Company in San Francisco.

Hall adopted her professional name in 2013, transitioning from Celina Carvajal to Lena Hall, a name she had originally created for her music persona. She explained that "Lena Hall" is formed from shortenings of her first and last name, and that she chose it in part because it evokes the name of singer Lena Horne. She later discovered that "Carvajal" was itself a stage name taken seven generations earlier that had become a family name, which she cited as a reason she felt at ease making the change.

Her Broadway debut came in 1999 in Cats, in which she took over the role of Demeter after first performing the role on the national tour in 1998. She subsequently took over the role of Ann "Anytime Annie" Reilly in 42nd Street. In 2004, Hall was part of the original ensemble of Dracula, the Musical, where she also understudied Kelli O'Hara in the role of Lucy Westenra. Two years later, she joined the original ensemble of Tarzan, understudying Jennifer Gambatese as Jane Porter. In 2013, she originated the role of Nicola in Kinky Boots, a production that won the Tony Award for Best Musical at the 67th Tony Awards.

Hall's most celebrated Broadway credit is her performance as Yitzhak in the 2014 revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a role previously played Off-Broadway by Miriam Shor. She performed opposite Neil Patrick Harris and subsequently alongside Darren Criss, Michael C. Hall, Andrew Rannells, and John Cameron Mitchell before leaving the role on April 4, 2015. Her performance earned her the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical at the 68th Tony Awards, as well as a Grammy nomination for the production's official album. In 2016, Hall joined the national tour of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, reprising her role as Yitzhak while also performing the title role of Hedwig for one performance per week, totaling eight performances in Los Angeles and San Francisco alongside Darren Criss. This made her the first performer to play both Hedwig and Yitzhak within the same production.

Her Off-Broadway credits include Radiant Baby, a 2003 musical about artist Keith Haring; Bedbugs!!!, in which she played Carly at the New York Musical Theatre Festival; Rooms: A Rock Romance, where she understudied Leslie Kritzer as Monica P. Miller; The Toxic Avenger, in which she took over the lead role of Sarah at New World Stages; Prometheus Bound, performed at the American Repertory Theater, where she played Daughter of the Ocean; Chix6; Little Shop of Horrors; and the 2017 Sarah Ruhl play How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, in which she played Pip opposite Marisa Tomei at Lincoln Center. Hall also performed in a national tour of Annie Get Your Gun, understudying the lead role of Annie Oakley, and in 2008 competed on the reality program Legally Blonde: The Musical: The Search for Elle Woods, where she was the third contestant eliminated.

In addition to her stage work, Hall has appeared in several films, including Sex and the City (2008), The Graduates (2008), Born from the Foot (2009), The Big Gay Musical (2009), and Becks (2017), in which she played the title role in her first leading performance in a feature film. Becks received widespread critical acclaim and won the U.S. Fiction Award at the LA Film Festival. Her television credits include nine episodes of ABC's All My Children in 2009, in which she played Treena; the role of Juicy Lucy in Amazon Prime's Good Girls Revolt; the role of Holly in an episode of HBO's Girls; and the voice of Countess Coloratura, also known as Rara, in the 115th episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, titled "The Mane Attraction." She also performed songs alongside Tony Vincent for the fictional band "Dog Gone" in the 2015 PBS series Nature Cat. In 2020, Hall joined the cast of TNT's science fiction series Snowpiercer as Miss Audrey. In 2021, she voice acted in a live-streamed reading of a science fiction screenplay titled Aurora by Joe Scott, playing multiple roles in a Halloween special whose proceeds were donated to Team Seas.

Hall was the lead singer of the band The Deafening, which released an album of original songs titled Central Booking in 2012. On September 28, 2015, she released her first solo album, Sin & Salvation: Live At the Carlyle, recorded at the Carlyle Hotel during a two-week run of her musical show of the same name. The album features her renditions of songs by artists including Led Zeppelin, Tori Amos, Hozier, and James Brown. In 2018, she released a series of twelve digital EPs titled Obsessed, one per month, with the January installment featuring selections from Hedwig and the Angry Inch and each subsequent release featuring her interpretations of songs by a different artist. Following her run in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Hall also toured North America alongside Josh Groban on his Stages Tour.