Reality TV star Whitney Leavitt announced her Broadway debut on December 1st. She will be performing in Chicago as the main character, Roxie Hart. Her run is from February 2nd to March 15th at the Ambassador Theatre in New York City. While many people support her in her new role, others are opposed to it, as she has not made a good reputation for herself recently. After her elimination from this past season of Dancing With the Stars (DWTS) and her overall appearance on the most recent season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (SLOMW), she’s gained a lot of hate. She also allegedly has no singing background, so it’s unclear as to how she will perform on Broadway this winter.
She gained the majority of her hate when the third season of the SLOMW aired while DWTS was ongoing. Leavitt originally left the SLOMW, but returned for the season to appear on DWTS, which only created drama between her and Jen Affleck, another star on the SLOMW who was also scheduled to appear on this season of DWTS. Leavitt now claims that Affleck, along with the rest of the SLOMW, was calling her the “villain” of the story, and she struggled to cope with all the negative comments in general.
There is no doubt that Leavitt’s dancing abilities weren’t what got her eliminated from DWTS. She earned some of the highest scores of the season early on, but her popular votes could not make up for that. By Week 10, when she and her partner, Mark Ballas, were eliminated, the third season of the SLOMW had been released, and all the backlash started coming in.
It also didn’t help that Leavitt had previous dance experience, having earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance from BYU. Fans believe the show is about teaching celebrities who cannot dance, so they weren’t in her favor from the start.
Highly upset with her elimination, she and Ballas then starred on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, where they choreographed their own freestyle, as if they were still in the finale of DWTS. Many viewers saw this as petty and immature. It seemed like Leavitt couldn’t get past the fact that she had been eliminated. She even claimed in the interview portion of the podcast that she felt like her fan base had turned against her.
The podcast is also where she teased that she had some big announcements coming, which included both her Broadway debut and a new movie.
Whether her move to Broadway is to cope with the fact that she didn’t win the Len Goodman mirrorball or not, the public will never know. However, it is interesting to note how many turns her career has taken in just the past year.
