I Stand (2008), Holiday Wishes (2014), idina. (2016), and Christmas: A Season of Love (2019). Early life and education Idina Kim Mentzel was born on May 30, 1971, in Manhattan. She grew up in New Jersey until about age three, when her family moved to Syosset, New York, on Long Island. Her parents are Stuart Mentzel, a pajama salesman, and Helene Goldberg, a therapist. She has a younger sister named Cara. Menzel is Jewish, and her grandparents emigrated from Ukrainian Haisyn. Menzel attended J. Irving Baylis Elementary School in Plainview, New York, and then Syosset's H. B. Thompson Middle School and Syosset High School. When Menzel was 15 years old, her parents divorced and she began working as a wedding and bar/bat mitzvah singer, a job that she continued throughout her time at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drama in 1992. Idina changed the spelling of her surname to "Menzel" to better reflect the pronunciation that the Mentzel family had adopted in the United States. She was friends with actor Adam Pascal before they worked together in Rent. In 2017, during an interview with Irish New York–based songwriter Jimmy Walsh, he revealed that, in 1992, Menzel recorded a demo for him of the song "In Your Eyes", which went on to win the Eurovision Song Contest 1993 for Irish singer Niamh Kavanagh. Menzel was paid $75 for the recording. Career Theater career Rent to The Wild Party (1996–2000) In 1995, Menzel auditioned for Rent, which became her first professional theatre job and her Broadway debut. Rent opened Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop on January 26, 1996, but it moved to Broadway's Nederlander Theatre due to its popularity. For her performance as Maureen Johnson in the original cast of the musical, Menzel received a Tony nomination as Best Featured Actress in a Musical losing to Ann Duquesnay for Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. Her final performance in the musical was on July 1, 1997. Despite her breakout performance in Rent, Menzel did not experience the immediate success she was expecting, claiming she subsequently faded into "obscurity" for the following eight years. Following the success of Rent, Menzel released her first solo album entitled Still I Can't Be Still on Hollywood Records. Menzel also originated the role of Dorothy in Summer of '42 at