Whitney Leavitt Joins Broadway's 'Just In Time' as Sandra Dee for Six-Week Run
Whitney Leavitt, known to reality-TV audiences from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, will make her Broadway debut in Just In Time, taking over the role of Sandra Dee for a limited six-week engagement. Lead producers Tom Kirdahy, Robert Ahrens and John Frost announced the casting on August 13. People magazine separately confirmed the news the same day.
Leavitt begins performances on Tuesday, December 1, at the Circle in the Square Theatre, with her final bow set for Sunday, January 10, 2027. A limited engagement — a booking with a fixed end date, as opposed to an open-ended run — gives the production a window to spotlight a new face in the cast without committing to an indefinite stay.
Just In Time is a Bobby Darin bio-musical — a show built around the life and songs of a real performer — staged as an immersive nightclub experience. Directed and developed by Tony Award winner Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!, Beetlejuice), the production puts audiences inside the room rather than behind a proscenium. The score draws on Darin's biggest hits, including "Beyond the Sea," "Mack the Knife," "Splish Splash," and "Dream Lover." The book is by Warren Leight, with music supervision and arrangements by Andrew Resnick and choreography by Shannon Lewis.
The role of Sandra Dee — the 1950s and '60s screen idol who married Darin in 1960 — has already cycled through notable performers. The show opened on April 26, 2025, with Jonathan Groff as Darin and Erika Henningsen as Dee, earning critical acclaim. The current cast features Jeremy Jordan, a two-time Tony nominee for The Great Gatsby and Newsies, in the Darin role, with Carrie St. Louis playing Dee.
Leavitt steps into that lineup for the holidays — the stretch between Thanksgiving and early January that is, for most Broadway shows, the most lucrative weeks of the year, when tourist traffic swells and houses run near capacity.
The Circle in the Square is one of Broadway's most intimate venues, a theater in the round where no seat is far from the stage. The Chicago Tribune, in a review cited by the production, wrote that the show's ambiance made audiences not want to go back outside. Whether Leavitt's reality-TV following translates into ticket sales at the box office is a question the grosses — the weekly earnings reports published by the Broadway League — will answer once she starts.
