Eight times a week, Bianca Leigh steps into her constrictive period undergarments backstage at the historic Lyceum Theatre. Earlier in Oh, Mary!’s run, first downtown at the Lucille Lortel Theatre before transferring to Broadway in July, the costume would sometimes make her feel claustrophobic. “I remember sitting on the greenroom couch thinking, I can’t believe that these women wore all this shit! What could they do but needlepoint all day?” she says, still clad in a pair of blue jeans and a very 21st-century blouse. As dynamic a storyteller as she is a performer, Leigh straightens her back and compresses her clavicle while discussing the antiquated shapewear, as if it were at present remolding her torso and squeezing the oxygen out of her.
Leigh had been early for our meeting, though she apologized for running late the moment we met. She’d then whisked me up to her dressing room, tucked away stage left at the top of a winding staircase, while she detailed her commute to midtown from the East Village. (The L train is her favorite: “It’s the greatest train in the city. I can take that to any line I want to go to, it’s fabulous.”) The actress sounds just as mellifluous as she did during the previous night’s production of Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola’s Broadway smash in which Leigh plays the Pollyanna chaperone to Escola’s nightmarish Mary Todd Lincoln. But in this afternoon’s role as my interview subject, Leigh’s voice now bears a subtle tristate accent, the particular inflections and gorgeously rounded vowels you’d expect from a woman who was raised in New Jersey by Long Islanders who were raised by Brooklynites. She’s a consummate hostess as we settle in, unscrewing a couple of bulbs in her vanity to soften the light just a touch, offering me a seat and a glass of sparkling water. Louise, her goody-goody chaperone character, would be proud, though she might furrow her brow if she heard what Leigh thinks of her onstage outfits. “There’s a learning curve to wearing corsets and hoop skirts, but your body finds ways,” she says.
Because of her costume’s demands on her body, Leigh makes sure to do some vocal warm-ups before every show, as well as some stretches and strength-training exercises like squats and planks. “I have buns of steel hiding under those petticoats,” she says. After that, she’ll wash up and head into hair and makeup before finally putting on her costume one level down in the wings; her hoopskirt and petticoats would never make it through her dressing room’s doorway, much less the spiral staircase down to the stage. It’s a lot to manage in three hours’ time, but Leigh’s serenity betrays no concern.
“I’m just grateful to say I have a job,” Leigh tells me with a smile. “As exciting as this other stuff is,” like the widespread critical acclaim or the fact that Oh, Mary! managed to shatter the Lyceum’s box-office record in its first few weeks of production, “I’m extremely grateful that this has all happened for me. After working hard for many years and being shut out of things for so long, I’m here, and I’m in this because of my talent.”
Born in 1962, Leigh grew up in the far-eastern reaches of Philadelphia’s orbit, first in Willingboro, New Jersey — one of the nearly half-dozen Levittowns to spring up after World War II — and later in another Jersey suburb much like it. She aspired to stardom from an early age, but “in the Old Hollywood way that didn’t exist anymore, even back then,” she says. “The silk charmeuse robe with the marabou trim … I would watch these black-and-white movies with Carole Lombard, Rita Hayworth, and Barbara Stanwyck. I fell in love with the way they spoke, the way they moved.” She adored Lucille Ball in particular. “I would watch I Love Lucy every day after school,” she says. She never missed an episode. One time, a bully in her class challenged her to a fight in the park after classes let out around 3:30 p.m. “Make it four!” she recalls telling him. “I gotta watch Lucy!”
It wasn’t long before Leigh herself took to the stage, starting with a local community-theater production of Gypsy that needed children for one of its scenes. “I couldn’t have been older than 5, maybe 6, but I loved every minute of it,” she says. “I loved watching the rehearsals, and then when the curtain finally went up and I saw the lights and the laughter and the applause … That was it.” She also developed her skills as a performer by taking dance classes. “My sister took ballet, and I took tap because ‘boys’ weren’t allowed to take ballet,” she says. “As trans people, we start second-guessing ourselves from a really young age because our natural inclinations, the toy that we reach for, anything we want could get us in trouble or get us smacked or embarrassed in front of everyone.”
The rules around gender were clear and exacting, though Leigh carved out her own labyrinthine work-arounds where she could. “I wanted a Barbie, but I wasn’t allowed to play with Barbie,” she says. “I could play with my sister’s Barbie, however, but only if she was in the room.” Similarly conservative attitudes prevailed at Rutgers University, where she graduated from the Mason Gross School of the Arts with a B.F.A. in acting in 1984. While on the whole, she remembers her college years fondly, she recalls certain professors warning her and her classmates that coming out of the closet, any kind of closet, would sabotage their future careers. “I started looking into the initial steps of transitioning while I was a student, but I didn’t transition in school because I would have been kicked out,” she says. “I’d already been called into a meeting for being too feminine.”
The program, she remembers, was “obsessed” with making sure its students would be able to find work and discouraged them from doing anything that might preclude them from getting a job, sometimes at the risk of expulsion. Often, it was based on appearances. “Being ‘castable’ in their eyes was paramount,” Leigh says. “There’s a very good actress who, when I was graduating, was auditioning for the program. I told a professor, ‘Oh, she’s so talented! There’s just something that screams star quality about her!’ and the professor said, ‘She’s too tall. She’ll never work.’” That other actress, whom Leigh won’t name, did end up finding success. “Some of it has been her own work,” Leigh concedes. “That’s what happens a lot when you are ‘difficult to cast’ or whatever you want to call it. No matter how many mainstream projects you audition for, there are gaps on your résumé that might be larger than they would be for somebody who’s more mainstream, so a lot of us have learned to write.”
Leigh’s career began in fits and starts, she tells me, rearranging the objects on a nearby end table without even looking at them — an actress ever in search of some stage business. “I would start building momentum, and then it would slow down,” she says. The cycle would repeat. When she was in between gigs in the mid-2010s, she helped train NYU medical students on how to work with trans patients by role-playing various scenarios, and she’s often spent those lean periods creating her own work, having written six different stage shows over the past 12 years. “I’m working on a web series called Trans Cougar and a pilot about a trans vampire and a reincarnated lesbian witch who meet and start dating,” she says. “Supernatural high jinks ensue.”
Her first original production, Busted, a musical about “the awkward, hilarious situations that would come up between the girls and law enforcement” in the 1980s, premiered at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in 2012. She also authored one of the monologues published in 2023’s Overheard: Fourteen Commissioned Monologues Written by TNB2S+ Artists for TNB2S+ Artists and MBJrT, which Kansas City Repertory Theatre produced as part of its Monday Night Playwright Series in 2018.
On her vanity counter, I spot a commemorative mug for Transvestigation, her one-woman show that’s part stand-up, part sketch comedy, part cabaret. (Next to the mug are an unhung piece of Wonder Woman wall art and a signed letter from Bernadette Peters taped to a corner of the mirror inviting Leigh to participate in her annual Broadway Barks charity event.) Originally performed at Pangea, the downtown cabaret supper club, Transvestigation returned in August for a one-night revival at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, where Leigh, in full glam, brought the house down in a pink lamé jumpsuit straight out of ABBA’s wardrobe. One the biggest rounds of applause came shortly after it started when Leigh, who’d just sung Stephen Sondheim’s “Broadway Baby,” quipped, “Now I can really sing that one.”
Since the 1980s, the landscape for trans and nonbinary actors has changed dramatically. When Leigh was starting out, it was unheard of for such artists to be as successful as they can be today — starring in Chicago as Angelica Ross and Jinkx Monsoon have both done in recent years, originating roles on Broadway as Peppermint did in 2018’s Head Over Heels, winning Tony Awards as Alex Newell and J. Harrison Ghee did in 2023, or joining the casts of major tours and revivals as Sis, Hennessy Winkler, and others have done. Now, it is “completely different,” Leigh says. Still, despite the relative lack of opportunities in decades past, Leigh never stopped performing, slowly working her way up from nightclubs and smaller, off-the-beaten-path venues to stages as grand as the American Repertory Theater in Boston, where she starred in Trans Scripts, a play in the vein of The Vagina Monologues that aimed to reflect the lived experiences of trans women, in 2017 alongside Pose star Michaela Jaé Rodriguez. Leigh was also cast in Trans Scripts’s 2015 run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as well as in bicoastal workshop productions of a Tales of the City musical, adapted from Armistead Maupin’s long-running series of novels, first in New York in 2009 and then in San Francisco the following year.
Escola, the playwright and star of Oh, Mary!, recalls being transfixed by Leigh’s performance in another 2009 production, that of The Lily’s Revenge, an Off–Off Broadway spectacular by the legendary performance artist Taylor Mac. “She had this divine, powerful, regal quality like Judith Anderson,” they told me over email. “When she’s onstage, you can’t take your eyes off her.” She’s captivating onscreen, too. Leigh played a psychiatrist on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, eulogizing a trans teenager in a 2015 episode that, having aired amid the whole “Transgender Tipping Point” conversation, seems to have been an attempt to present a more sensitive portrayal of the community than the show was historically known for. She was also featured heavily in Disclosure, director Sam Feder’s 2020 documentary about trans representation in Hollywood, and she starred opposite Bianca Del Rio in the Drag Race winner’s 2016 comedy, Hurricane Bianca. Most memorably, Leigh played the stealth organizer of a clandestine trans-support group in Transamerica, the Oscar-nominated 2005 film starring Felicity Huffman.
“When I graduated and came to New York, this type of mainstream, legitimate theater world, television, film — they didn’t want anything to do with trans people,” she says. “Even after Transamerica, I had agents in L.A. going, ‘Oh my God! You’re the real deal!’ But when I’d ask them to represent me, they would say, ‘I can’t represent someone like you. There’s not enough work!’ But then things started opening up.” She points to Laverne Cox, Candis Cayne, Sandra Caldwell, and Alexandra Billings as actors who have turned the tides for trans performers onscreen. These were actors who “got a television gig, showed up, knew their lines, made their mark, and were great to work with,” Leigh says. “I’ll always appreciate that, because that showed them that ‘these people’ can be real actors. They can be real professionals.”
As Oh, Mary!’s Louise, Leigh flits about the stage with measured movements and impeccable posture, maneuvering around in Mother Goose’s Sunday best with the elegance and ease you’d expect of the character. She’s a walking, talking book on elocution for an American English dialect that doesn’t exist in this timeline. Louise’s speech is comically mannered, placing her emphasis on unexpected syllables (hummingbird, ice cream …) and her outlook naïve to a fault. When Mary says something about seeing “a smile behind your eyes,” Louise jumps to correct her, one finger raised in the air: “A smile comes from the mouth, not the eyes!”
Oh, Mary!’s Broadway run has been extended twice now, and celebrities have been scrambling to see it before it’s set to close on January 19 of next year. Patti LuPone, in particular, has seen the show at least twice. “I was very starstruck,” Leigh says of her backstage encounter with the Broadway grande dame. “She told us, ‘Every single one of you is amazing!’ That meant a lot, to know that she sees the ensemble and appreciates what everyone is doing. I told her, ‘Thank you so much, Ms. LuPone!’ and she was like, ‘Patti! Call me Patti.’”
In doing the show, Leigh has also gotten to meet Gina Gershon, another of her personal icons. (“She took that role in Showgirls and made Cristal Connors a multidimensional, nuanced human being that was also gorgeous and camp,” she gushes. “That’s the kind of work I love doing — extreme theatricality.”) A-listers like Jennifer Aniston and Whoopi Goldberg have also popped by to congratulate the cast. (“They were both so down-to-earth and accessible — like, ‘Oh! you’re exactly how I hoped you’d be!’”) But we’ve no more time to revel in the stories — we’ve run about eight minutes over as it is. Leigh’s got a show to do. “I’ve done a lot of really great productions,” she says before escorting me out of her dressing room, down the winding staircase, and back down the hallway toward the stage door. “But to be in something like this — it’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of hit. It doesn’t get better than this.”