Whitney and the City

Reality star Whitney Leavitt has left Utah to pursue her Broadway dreams— and refuses to be mom-shamed for it.

- Jen Ortiz

MOST, IF NOT ALL, New Yorkers hate Times Square for one reason or another. The retina-burning lights of all those billboards and mall stores and bland, overpriced chain restaurants. The hawkers for double-decker bus tours and 360-degree-camera photo ops who don't take “no” for an answer. The Naked Cowboy—he’s still around, still taking selfies in a pair of tighty-whities, and, worse, still blocking the sidewalk.

The six-block-long stretch of Broadway isn’t for us. It belongs to the crush of slow-walking tourists who have flown in just for this. Except for tonight. Tonight, this Disneyfied hellscape belongs to the city’s newest transplant, Whitney Leavitt, and the packed theater of mostly women, plus their patient boyfriends and husbands, who have come to witness her big Broadway break. Later, when the audience first sees Leavitt beaming from stage left, they literally roar.

The 32-year-old redhead has come a long way from going viral for uploading a TikTok of her dancing in the hospital next to her infant with RSV. Leavitt is in town to play Chicago’s Roxie Hart, the wannabe starlet who won't let a little public humiliation get in her way. It’s a role known for stunt-casting—recent Roxies have included fellow reality-TV showgirls Ariana Madix and Erika Jayne—but she’s taking the whole thing extremely seriously, an appropriate turn for the story-line-dominating, follower-hungry “villain” of Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. It shows onstage. Over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour-long production, her voice gets stronger, more confident, and less nasal with each musical number. Her acting and dancing are even better, the role a perfect match for her brand of high-energy TikTok theatricality. Her face is never not playing to the cheap seats.