When I took my seat in the mezzanine of Chicago The Musical starring Ariana Madix on New York City’s Broadway, the room was abuzz. Below me, influencers and reality TV stars — including Madix’s co-stars Scheana Shay and Lala Kent — dotted the first few rows. Around them, gaggles of 30-something women lined up hoping for a chance at a selfie and a hug. Directly in front of me was a group of six 40-something women who had flown up from Georgia to be here for this very moment. Next to them sat two older men who had no idea the phenomenon they were about to experience. Their neighbors gave them a quick backstory before gesturing to the stage and saying, this is Ariana’s karmic retribution.
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The Ariana in question is, of course, Ariana Madix of Vanderpump Rules and most recently the wronged woman in the pop culture moment that was Scandoval. In case you missed it, Madix was in a relationship with fellow Vanderpump cast member, Tom Sandoval, for nine years until March 2023, when news broke, while Season 10 was airing, that Sandoval was having a months-long affair with another cast member (and Madix’s friend), Rachel (formerly Raquel) Leviss. In May 2023, “#Scandoval” (an unplanned bonus episode filmed after the original season wrapped) aired on Bravo and the internet, now armed with the nitty gritty details and an arsenal of memes, took Madix’s side. She gained followers en masse, raked in sponcon dollars, and was a finalist on Dancing With The Stars. Now, living every theater kid’s dream (per her playbill bio, Madix holds a BA in theater arts from Flagler College), she has made her broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago.
From the moment Madix took the stage to her final double standing ovation, she had the audience wrapped around her finger. When Roxie, a showgirl in 1920s Chicago with dreams of making it big, kills a man for walking out on her, the audience cheered. When she is sent to jail for the murder and her fellow inmates sing “he only had himself to blame,” the audience roared in agreement. When Roxie tells the audience her life of “no, no, no” was over and now “the name on everybody’s lips is gonna be Roxie,” the audience lost their minds.
On stage, Madix is all of us. She was us in high school after our boyfriend dumped us for our best friend, she was us at 20 sobbing our way through our first true heartbreak, and she’s us now, when the person we thought would be our life-long partner turned out to be a lie. And she made us all the champions of our own stories. For those two hours and 30 minutes, we all got to say to our pasts, “You mess with us, we’ll turn around and make our dreams come true.” By the end of the night, there were tears in my eyes. When I ran into a friend after the show, we couldn’t stop beaming with pride. We felt like proud soccer moms after our kid scored the winning goal — Madix has been through the ringer, worked unbelievably hard, and come out the other side better than before.
Now, I am no theater critic, but if I were, I’d give Madix five stars. She hit her notes, danced her steps, and nailed her jokes. Her physical comedy was spectacular, her chemistry was palpable, and her stage presence was magnetic. But perhaps what I loved most was the way her castmates held her up. You could see the sparkle in their eyes, the little nods they gave Madix when she finished a dance sequence, the flowers they gave her at curtain call. The energy of the night was so electric we were no longer separate people with our own stories, but one single collective. All of us — the audience, the cast, and Madix — were in this together and, as Carrie Fisher once said, turning that broken heart into art.
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