Reality TV Imitates Art Imitates Life in Broadway's 'Chicago'

Years later and a world away, Whitney Leavitt and Taylor Frankie Paul, the respective influencer micro-villains, are household names. Their launching pad, Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, has left a Bravo-sized crater in the reality television landscape. Paul is recruited to The Bachelorette and Leavitt completes a run on Dancing With the Stars as a semifinalist, having long since left her co-star Jen Affleck in the dust on the road to the Mirrorball trophy. The dust still settling on stage, she announces her forthcoming role as Roxie Hart in Broadway’s long running cult classic, Chicago.

Art, it seems, imitates life — at least on Broadway. At least in Chicago.

The 1975 musical concerns itself with the inmates at a Chicago women’s prison at the height of the Jazz Age, themselves less thinking individuals and instead avatars of the perceived debauchery of the “Roaring Twenties.” Sexual beings maddened by lust and fame and jealousy and restrictive gender norms. Based on the Maurine Dallas Watkins play of the same name, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly act out events eerily similar to the real-life 1924 murders of Harry Kalstedt and Walter Law at the hands of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner respectively.

Roxie, an attention seeking murderess with stage lights for brains, finds herself pulled into orbit around jailbird Velma, a washed up vaudevillian looking to spin her prison stint into the tabloid sensation that launches her next big act.

The movie scene most will remember is their dream realized: having escaped the noose, they stage a tongue-in-cheek vaudeville act lamenting the moral degeneracy of their swiftly changing society, brandishing prop tommy guns they fire into a crowd of similarly degenerate fans and patrons. It’s quite delicious, really, and holds up as an enduring critique of violence and spectacle on the American stage.

Chicago endures, but the stage has changed.

The 1996 revival, the longest running show on the weary streets of Broadway, has maintained its relevancy over the last three decades through the stunt casting of its many Roxies. Melanie Griffith, Pamela Anderson, Erika Jayne, Lisa Rinna alongside husband Harry Hamlin as Billy Flynn, and more recently, Bravo’s one true breakout star: Ariana Madix. It is in her shadow that Leavitt creeps, but the dramatic twist of Jayne's sudden divorce and ensuing court melodrama, in which she and her husband were accused of defrauding everyone from plane crash survivors to burn victims, hangs heavy around the stage door.

Prior to her surprise turn as a Broadway sensation and the host of two record-breaking seasons of Love Island USA, Madix was a reality television star most known for being cheated on by her boyfriend with a bad mustache and an even worse band.

This is not to cast aspersions on her talent or meteoric rise to fame, which has included book deals and television guest spots and more brand deals than People can reasonably post about. I simply mean to point out the obvious, which is that Madix was introduced to a global audience when a man that owned a novelty bar in West Hollywood for Disney adults destroyed their relationship by sneaking around with a washed up pageant contestant. The network soon marketed her public humiliation as “Scandoval,” picking up cameras post-season on Vanderpump Rules while re-editing then-airing episodes to tease out the embarrassment over 20 weeks.

Madix, who only ever wanted to be an actress and improv comedian, became the internationally recognized symbol for scorned women past, present and future. Her dreams once discarded gained new life, and once the requisite two season contract with Bravo wrapped, she joined the rank-and-file of Broadway as Roxie Hart in 2024. Her debut was the then-highest grossing non-holiday performance week in the show’s 28 year history. The run was extended, and she reprised it later that fall.

I was in the crowd for her opening night on Broadway the first time around, having secured tickets courtesy my friend Natalie Walker, a Broadway actress herself. The mass of hysterical Bravo fans around me were much like those imagined at the end of “Nowadays,” as Roxie and Velma perform an abject display of American tabloid media. All around me, fans were escorted out by Broadway staff for rowdiness and rule-breaking, shouting and screaming and clamoring to enshrine Madix on secret cameras and Instagram Live feeds. I had never seen anything like it — not in my 30 years on earth or the decade spent covering popular culture professionally. It was as if I’d been transported through the show’s book and into the liminal space between the score’s margins.

The same gossip-fueled hysteria has followed in the wake of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, buoyed by Paul and Leavitt’s dueling charisma. It helps, somewhat, that the rest of the fellow inmates in their TikTok penitentiary are desperate to camp in the tabloid space carved out by their coworkers’ viral misfortunes. Recent headlines out of the comments section include accusations of falsified sexual assault allegations, cease and desists, and cheating scandals involving z-list reality stars I cannot be bothered to learn the names of.

Most notably, however, are claims from fellow cast mates that Leavitt is an opportunist, her recent success a mere byproduct of her thirst for fame. She admits to it herself on the show's recent third season, telling viewers she only re-joined her former frenemies in the trenches for a contract stipulation that she'd be considered for Dancing With the Stars.

Still, that anyone on reality television can confidently call another an attention seeking egotist delights me; it is the delusion viewers tune in to watch them all fuss over in the first place. It almost calls to mind the reaction to Madix’s star turn post-Scandoval, in which she broke free of Bravo’s gravity well. The season following the affair between Tom Sandoval and Raquel Leviss saw cast mates turn on their former friend, with longtime villainess Lala Kent infamously proclaiming: “I’ve never met someone who got cheated on and became God.”

I’ve never seen someone do a TikTok dance to explain their newborn’s life-threatening medical diagnosis crib-side in a hospital and become god either.

Such jealous infighting is likewise the long shadow of the canon rivalry between Roxie and Velma at the center of Chicago. The young marionette with a promising new future, cluelessly evading the petty machinations of the jilted puppet who’d just had her strings cut by the same public now praising the latest toy. But is she so clueless, and is she so different than Velma?

Ironic, really, how utterly off-the-mark the two characters are from inside the margins of the show. “In fifty years or so, it’s gonna change, you know?” Nothing has changed, full cycles and a hundred years later. Not for audiences, not for Roxie or Velma, not for Ariana Madix and certainly not for Whitney Leavitt.

Images via Getty