Ben Platt! Rachel Zegler! Sutton Foster! King Kong? Behind the Scenes of Trisha Paytas’s Broadway Debut

Six nights a week at the St. James Theater, you can catch Nicole Scherzinger—or her understudy—belt through the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. But this past Monday, when that show’s cast had the day off, another diva made her Broadway debut.

“Is that… Trisha Paytas?”

Waiting in line to enter the theater, I watched two men stop dead in their tracks to gawk at the marquee. Featuring a photo of the YouTuber-slash-influencer in a pink robe with pink fur trim, at first glance, it could have been mistaken for a revival of Legally Blonde: The Musical.

“Is she doing a musical? A play? Or like a one-woman show?” asked one.

“Whatever it is, good for her,” said the other.

For one night only, Paytas took over the Great White Way with Trisha Paytas’s Big Broadway Dream. While casual observers may find it odd that a media personality best known for recording mukbangs in the front seat of her car should suddenly appear on Broadway, Paytas’s legions of fans—her YouTube channel boasts 5.1 million subscribers—know that musical theater has always been her greatest passion. This, after all, is the woman who once self-funded a music video for “Suddenly Seymour” from Little Shop of Horrors in which she played every character.

So last April Fools’ Day, when Theaterly posted on Instagram that Paytas was going to star as Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway—a role she’s actively campaigned for—many didn’t realize it was a joke. After Paytas shared the post, hundreds of thousands of fans bought tickets to Chicago, expecting to see her fulfill a lifelong dream. All this gave her an idea.

Eight months later, with the help of Gen-Z theater producers George Strus and Kobi Kassal, Paytas managed to make her Big Broadway Dream a reality, selling out all 1,700 seats of the St. James in a matter of minutes last December.

“I realized how lucky I am to have a supportive community online,” Paytas told Vogue the morning after her performance. “I grew up with a lot of ‘you can’t do this’ people in my life, but now the power is in the people thanks to social media, and they’ve rallied behind me.”

The greatest night of Paytas’s life featured appearances from Broadway luminaries like Rachel Zegler and Sutton Foster, who performed duets from Rent and La Cage Aux Folles with an awestruck Paytas. The night then culminated with a Broadway-worthy spectacle in which Paytas and a troupe of six dancers shimmied their way through a Trisha-themed medley of theater classics (Think: A Trisha on the Roof, A Little Night Trisha, Mamma Trisha!)

“I truly can say that I’ve achieved all of my dreams now,” Paytas says. “I don’t even know what I could possibly ask for next.”

To commemorate her Broadway debut, Paytas shared some exclusive snaps with Vogue from her big week in New York.