One weekday in fall 2024, I took my son to our neighborhood playground to break up the monotony of stay-at-home-mom life. I got him settled on a swing, then turned to make small talk with the mother pushing next to me, only to stop short. The mom was Whitney Leavitt.

I had just finished watching Season 1 of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” and was set to record a podcast episode about her the following night. What was she doing at my outdated, not-even-on-Google-Maps park?

My journalistic tendencies urged me to capitalize on the coincidence. Could I get a scoop for my podcast that would help boost ratings? Another part of me was slightly scared of her after having watched the first season. Yet another part of me felt sympathy for her. She was probably eight months pregnant, looked exhausted, and I could only assume her presence in my neighborhood meant she had been forced to flee hers.

I waited too long, or more likely my self-consciousness won out, because before I could say anything, she called for her nanny to swap her out and went to collapse on the grass next to her daughter. I could not in a million years have predicted then that, just 18 months later, I would be sitting in a theater grinning like an idiot while watching her on Broadway.

I’m no theater expert, but I’ve seen enough to know that watching Whitney Leavitt in “Chicago” was a singular experience. The energy in the crowd was electric. The number of times the ushers had to stop people from taking cellphone footage was in the dozens. And the line to the women’s restroom at intermission? Entirely made up of millennial women like me.

Seeing Whitney on Broadway was the Official Girls Trip of 2026. Before the show started, my sisters-in-law and I chatted with a group of nine women seated next to us who had flown in from Boston. While waiting at the stage door, I asked another group of women if they had any personal connection to Whitney.

“No, I’m just so inspired by her,” one said. “The way she’s managed to chase her dreams after being a mom is incredible,” another added.

Whitney and Roxie

I’ve written before about Whitney’s unabashed ambition being both what made her the villain on “Secret Lives” and what would eventually rescue her from it. In the wake of her recent announcement that she’s leaving the reality show and starting her own media company, I’m left thinking about the similarities between Whitney and her “Chicago” character Roxie Hart.

If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a quick refresher on the musical. “Chicago” centers around several women imprisoned for the suspected murders of their husbands. The women are down but not out as their leader Velma, the prison matriarch, has come up with a plan: They’ll turn their infamy into celebrity and eventually get out of jail to become vaudeville stars.

When Roxie joins the inmates for the suspected murder of a man she’s having an affair with, she challenges Velma’s status as the top press darling, and their competition fuels the remainder of the story.

Roxie manipulates the scandal-hungry press into loving her more than Velma. She teams up with sleazy lawyer Billy Flynn to get the jury on her side. When it seems the public has grown tired of her, she even fakes a pregnancy to re-center herself in the narrative. The theme of the entire production is the fickle nature of fame and celebrity and the victims they leave behind.

As I watched Whitney singing Roxie’s iconic lyrics — “the name on everybody’s lips is gonna be Roxie” — it felt almost too meta. I couldn’t believe anyone had questioned her being cast as a woman baldly chasing fame in hopes of legitimizing her stardom.

So much of the discourse around real life Whitney has centered on whether she has manipulated people and situations to get ahead — an empty and somewhat hilarious accusation when her fellow reality show castmates are, by definition, doing the same thing.

But Whitney has done it with a frankness people have, for some reason, deemed unacceptable. When she acknowledged coming back to Season 3 of “Secret Lives” solely so she could audition for “Dancing With the Stars,” the backlash was swift, possibly even leading to her early exit from the show. Whitney’s shamelessness has not always left her unscathed. Who can forget the TikTok in which she danced next to her sick baby in the hospital? And while she never faked a pregnancy, she did once host a pregnancy reveal in which her parents cut into a cake only to find the actual positive pregnancy test hidden inside it.

Like Roxie, Whitney has managed to continually transform public fame to pitch herself as a legitimate performer, and I’m fascinated to see how it will unfold.

Star quality

Anyone I’ve told about seeing Whitney on Broadway has the same question: “Is she actually good?”

She is. That isn’t to say her dancing and, especially, singing were on par with her castmates. But her humor, her timing, her ability to command an audience were undeniably star quality. And paired with the fact this woman has three kids under age 6 at home and hadn’t danced since college makes me think her crazy scheme just might work. It already seems to have inoculated her to the drama surrounding the show.

I saw “Chicago” the weekend Season 4 of “Secret Lives” came out. It was surreal to walk out of the theater into Times Square and see a massive video billboard advertising the show, then another eight-story-tall billboard at the end of the block announcing Taylor Frankie Paul as the upcoming “Bachelorette.” I didn’t know then that in a matter of days the whole thing would implode.

But in the wake of Taylor’s domestic violence allegations and subsequent questions about the future of “Secret Lives,” Whitney’s gigs kept going. She announced an extended Broadway run with her “Dancing With the Stars” partner Mark Ballas. She was named the chief creative officer of a New York-based dirty soda chain. Her husband, Conner, recently had a limited run in an off-Broadway show, and the two of them will be at the helm of building their media empire together. So far, she seems to be getting exactly what Roxie did — a way out.

“Chicago” ends with Velma and Roxie, both having fallen out of the public eye, teaming up to start their own vaudeville act. They perform a number called “Nowadays,” and the final lyrics couldn’t feel more perfect.

You can like the life you’re living,

You can live the life you like…

And that’s good, isn’t it? Grand isn’t it? … Fun, isn’t it?

But nothing stays.

In 50 years or so

It’s gonna change, you know

But, oh, it’s heaven

Nowadays.

Like Roxie, Whitney is seizing her moment and running as far as she can. For my part, I genuinely hope her success lasts 50 years or so. And if she ever shows up at my neighborhood park again, I’ll be sure to tell her this time.

Note to readers • Rebbie Brassfield is a writer and creative director in the advertising industry. In real life, she’s a mom of two boys living in the suburbs. Online, you can find her overanalyzing media representations of Latter-day Saints on her Instagram account or podcast, “Mormons in Media,” and as co-host of a monthly “Mormon Land” bonus podcast on Latter-day Saints in media.