Chicago Star Ariana Madix Has Only a Few Days Left in Her ‘Favorite Place on the Planet’

Ariana Madix has just over two weeks left in her dream job at the Ambassador Theatre. In January, she made her Broadway debut as Chicago’s latest Roxie Hart, and has been killing eight times a week, soaking in a career milestone years in the making.

“Musical theater is what I've wanted to do my whole life,” Madix tells Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show. “I went to college for theater, I moved here originally to try to pursue that dream and then ended up with the bartending survival job.” That pivot led her to Lisa Vanderpump’s restaurants Villa Blanca and SUR, which landed her in an unexpected corner of the entertainment industry, joining the cast of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules in 2013.

“That kind of roundabout got me back here, which is insane to think,” Madix reflects. “But as soon as that call came in—the initial call that there was maybe some interest—I immediately was like, ‘I have to nail these workshops. They have to know that I can do this.’” Once she landed the role of Roxie, Madix, who had just honed her dance skills on season 32 of Dancing with the Stars, was determined to make it known that this was not a drive-by appearance. “In the rehearsal process, I was like, ‘Please don't dumb it down. I want the real deal. I want to prove myself.'”

Madix ended up extending her run as Roxie by two weeks, moving her March 24 exit date to April 7—but she would have happily kicked that can down the road even further if it weren’t for her next venture that awaits her on the West Coast.

“My friend Katie and I are opening a sandwich shop in West Hollywood, so there's a lot of work to be done there,” she tells Fadal, referring to Something About Her, a joint venture with her fellow Vanderpump star Katie Maloney. “We always joke that in every romcom and every Nancy Meyers movie there's always a cute little bookstore or coffee shop. So this is like our romcom moment.”

“Variety is the spice of life,” says Madix, lending a throughline to her winding road in the public eye. And yet, even after feeling the grind of a Broadway schedule, she wouldn’t be opposed to having that road circle back to the mean streets of Chicago. “We're looking at a very, very soon projected date,” Madix teases about the grand opening of Something About Her. “So I'm very excited to do that. But, once that happens, I would come back any time.”

And she means it. “Every night when I leave the theater and I'm about to turn off my dressing room lights—it's very corny,” she says, pausing. “But I always look into the mirror and I'm like, ‘Okay, another day in my favorite place on the planet.’”