Bebe Neuwirth

Neuwirth was born in Newark, New Jersey. Her father, Lee Neuwirth, was a mathematician who taught at Princeton University and also designed an encryption device while working at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Her mother, Sydney Anne Neuwirth, is a painter who also danced as an amateur for the Princeton Regional Ballet Company. She has an older brother Peter, a mathematician and actuary who graduated from Harvard. In her youth, Neuwirth rebelled against authority, being placed in custody for smoking marijuana when she was 13. Neuwirth started taking ballet lessons at the age of five, a year after viewing a production of The Nutcracker with her mother. She desired to be a ballet dancer until her early teens, when she realized how restricted her technique was, as well as the standard of ballet education where she lived. Upon viewing the musical Pippin in Manhattan at 13, she changed her future plans from becoming a ballerina to being a Broadway musical dancer. After graduating from Princeton High School in 1976, she attended the Juilliard School for dance and left after only a year, disliking the school for having a "stifling creative environment" and no Broadway-style dance training. Immediately after leaving Juilliard in 1977, she took singing and jazz classes at a New York City-based YWCA, one of them taught by Joan Morton Lucas, who appeared in the film Singin' in the Rain (1952) and the original Broadway production of Kiss Me Kate. She performed with the Princeton Ballet Company in Peter and the Wolf, The Nutcracker, and Coppélia, also appearing in community theater musicals.