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.
A few days before opening night, I meet her on a freezing afternoon, when the sidewalks are covered in a thin layer of slippery gray slush that has splashed dirty polka dots onto Leavitt’s white cashmere coat. She doesn’t seem to mind the weather despite being painfully underdressed, her bare legs not even shivering atop her pointy, sparkly high-heeled mules. Is she worried about being out in the cold? “I’m from Utah,” she deadpans as gamely as a pageant queen who has just watched her competition fall off the stage.
When her six-week Broadway stint is over, Leavitt, who studied dance at Brigham Young University after years of competitive dancing, has no plans to return to Utah; she’s staying for good. We’re tucked into a corner table at Sardi’s, the century-old Theater District restaurant known for the collection of framed caricatures of stage actors lining its dark-cherry interior. (Yes, Leavitt has already asked the maître d’, Johnny, how she can get on the wall.) “I hired movers,” she says. “They packed up our house. It’s for sale right now.”
Her coat’s draped across her chair now and she’s hugging her arms around her torso, the scratchy fabric of her Rabanne lace-and-chain-mail skirt rubbing against her skin. She has already stepped out of her heels, feet bare on the rug, which she says is helping her slowly warm up.
At Sardi’s, surrounded by some 1,200 portraits of Broadway greats.
Photo: Luisa Opalesky
Leavitt fell for the city here in Times Square (or, as she puts it, “the thick of it”) late last year while auditioning for Chicago. She told her husband, Conner, “Man, I just feel like I could see us staying here.” As loyal Secret Lives viewers know, the couple have moved around throughout their marriage — to different homes in Utah, to L.A. for Dancing With the Stars, to Hawaii briefly following the revelation that Conner had been swiping on Tinder — but it’s only now that she’s found her people. “I’ll be walking on the street, and I’m like, I feel like we’re all about to create and do great things,” she says, her doe eyes growing wider like those baby dolls’ that blink. “It’s a different energy, and this one fits me more.”
Well, at least the energy aboveground does. “I have yet to take the subway,” she says. “I would rather walk the extra mile.”
The family has been too busy to fully explore the city; she asks anyone who will listen to “please send me your recs” for everything from “foodie places” to neighborhoods where she should consider buying real estate. After a brief stint in Hell’s Kitchen, the family has moved into an apartment building on the Upper West Side with kid-friendly amenities, and Leavitt and Conner just got their two eldest children, Sedona, 6, and Liam, 4, into school. Leavitt’s daily schedule so far has consisted exclusively of work — rehearsals, media appearances, the occasional influencer brand dinner — and home life, like potty training 15-month-old Billy Gene. “It’s been very, very grueling, like, Goddamn,” she says. “So much respect for those Broadway stars. They work their asses off.” For now, everything else — their new routines, the places they’ll become regulars, other parent friends — will have to wait.
Leavitt hasn’t entirely left the Land of the Pioneers behind. The still-standing members of MomTok, and the production crew that follows their every move, came to New York the week after our interview to attend Leavitt’s opening night. She tells me, in a neutral tone that betrays nothing and would make the Hulu publicists proud, that her fellow cast members have all been supportive. “I like where I’m at in that group. I’m like, Let’s keep it,” she says between bites of the turkey club that arrived a few minutes ago, crowding a small heap of French fries. “With MomTok, it’s like those high-school friends where you haven’t talked to them in five years and then you see them and it’s as if it was yesterday.”
Asked if she sees a time in the near future when she’ll have to leave the show — an inevitability, it seems, if she’s living 2,442 miles away — she doesn’t really have an answer. “No matter what, that’s where my start was. Like people who were Nickelodeon stars, like Ariana Grande, that’s where they started, and that will always be a part of them. That will always be a part of me,” she says. “I don’t know what the future looks like. It’s gotten harder because as these other opportunities are happening, I still have this obligation. I am a very much all-in person, and it’s like, How do I commit time to this project while also this is where my passion really lies? I’m figuring it out in real time.”
That passion, it turns out, is a bigger screen. “I wanna be in the movies,” she says matter-of-factly at one point. The first time she confessed that aloud to anyone was on a date with Conner early in their relationship. That he took her seriously, that he encouraged her to take it seriously, was the push she needed. “I think when you say your dreams out loud, it holds you accountable more,” she says. Right now, her dream is to work with Ryan Murphy. She says his name while leaning into the recorder on the table like he’s on speakerphone: “R-Y-A-N-M-U-R — .”
When I try to coyly ask how she deals with certain people who mom-shame her for working so much, she cuts through my politeness with the efficiency of someone who’s filmed a reunion. “I didn’t listen to the full episode,” Leavitt says of The Viall Files podcast. In December, Nick Viall and his wife and co-host, Natalie Joy, came under fire for accusing Leavitt of putting her career before her kids. (“How is she managing prioritizing being a mom?” Joy asked.) “I was so confused because I was like, This feels so left field. Is this because I always say ‘no’ to your podcast? Legitimately, that crossed my mind,” she says. “I didn’t wanna respond because sometimes no response is the best response. But that perspective to me is crazy. I would want my mom, my daughter, any woman, to go fulfill her dreams. It seems like such an obvious thing to me. I don’t need to state the obvious.”
“And honestly,” she adds, smirking like a cheerleader with a secret, “the internet did it for them.”
There are moments like this during our conversation when it feels like we’ve been transported out of Sardi’s and into a Secret Lives confessional taping. The tone of her voice, the tilt of her head, both shift slightly toward me in a way that signals a good sound bite is coming. It’s the same as when her eyes grow bigger and wetter as she tells me that “being a mom is, in my opinion, one of the greatest gifts anyone could ever receive. And I cherish that gift, and I take care of that.” Or the way she says, “I love proving my haters wrong. I love it so much; it amps me up,” like the words are delicious. It’s not that I don’t believe her — she is polite, talks easily, laughs at herself; she’s delightful, really. But I can see her selling it. Whether it’s conscious doesn’t matter — it’s impressive either way. She’s just damn good at this.
As our lunch winds down, I ask if she’s feeling like a “real” New Yorker yet. The answer is “no,” she says, but she saw it happen for Conner when a tourist came up to him and asked for directions. Leavitt doesn’t know when it’ll come for her, though. “I need the community to be like, ‘Oh, she’s a New Yorker,’ ” she says. “I need validation.” The city, for its part, already seems to be embracing her. At the Ambassador Theatre stage door, about an hour after the final curtain drop and a standing ovation, antsy fans and nosy passersby waited in still-below-freezing temperatures, confirming to one another “She was so good” and “I didn’t think she’d be a good singer, but she’s a great singer” whenever they were not screaming every time the door opened. When Leavitt emerged to a line of selfies, hugs, and autographs, the crowd quieted down, suddenly patient and starstruck. Until someone, unable to contain themselves, finally yelled out, “Whitney, we love you!” Everyone, including Leavitt, was screaming again.
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