Nina White on Falling in Love With Musical Theater and Finding Her Voice in The Queen of Versailles

Age: 27

Hometown: Grosse Pointe, Michigan

Current Role: Nina White plays Victoria "Rikki" Siegel in The Queen of Versailles.

Credits: White made her Broadway debut originating the role of Teresa in Kimberly Akimbo. Onscreen, she appeared in the A24 film A Different Man and the Peacock TV series Long Bright River.

Gradually and Then All at Once
One of six kids, White was born outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan and lived in Salt Lake City, Utah for a couple years before returning to where her father's family is from outside of Detroit. She falls in the middle of her siblings, with two older brothers, a younger sister and two younger brothers. White grew up dancing, starting ballet classes at a very young age. "For a long time as a kid, I really wanted to be a ballet dancer," she says. "My parents played a lot of classical music, my dad really loves opera, but we weren't listening to musicals. Musical theater was not a part of my world at all." That fact changed thanks to "an amazing music teacher" she had in fifth grade, whose encouragement in class led to the realization that she truly enjoyed singing. As White puts it, her journey to musical theater felt "gradual and all at once, even a little bit backwards." While many performers see a production and realize that's what they're meant to do, she says, "that was never my experience. I learned that I liked it by doing it."

Triple Threat Training
The summer after fifth grade, she begged her mom to sign her up for a "Triple Threat Workshop" at the Grosse Pointe Dance Center, a two-week musical theater intensive through dance. "I was interested in doing other styles of dance after doing ballet for so long," she says, "and we did a lot of musical theater dance, we did scenes, we did songs, and I just thought it was so fun." Through the workshop, White found a "wonderful voice teacher" and began to get involved in community theater. She feels lucky to have grown up near Detroit, where there is a lot of community theater, and says she simply started looking online for local productions she could audition for. "My first role was Susan Walker in Miracle on 34th Street at the Farmington Players in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and oh my god, it was so fun. I couldn't believe how fun it was. I needed to keep doing it. I was Baby June in Gypsy right after; I was really on a tear that season," she laughs.

Children Will Listen
"Being from such a huge family, my parents had every excuse to not drive me 40 minutes to my rehearsals, which is normally what they were doing, but they were so supportive," White says. Her dad is a reporter for The Associated Press, and her mom was a lawyer before pivoting to raising the kids full-time. Now, she's a community organizer and political activist. "They were always, and still are, incredibly supportive of whatever different things my siblings and I want to do with our lives. I feel very lucky." White emphasizes how impactful her community theater experiences were, learning from the dedicated adults around her and hearing them talk about shows before going home to look them up and watch everything she could. "It's all kinds of people who are not pursuing theater for money, they're doing other things for their career during the day, but then devoting themselves in the evenings and on the weekends to making a show, which is so cool. It was very serious."

Great Adventure
White continued doing community theater through middle school, and by the time she got to high school, knew she wanted to go to college for musical theater and pursue it as a career. Still, dance was her first love. "I knew that I had amazing dance teachers where I lived, and I wanted to go to dance class until I didn't have time to anymore. So when I was in high school, I didn't do many productions. I danced all the time—26 hours a week—and I took voice lessons. I did some summer programs for acting." White went to the University of Michigan for college. "It was in-state, couldn't be better! I loved school and I learned so much there," she says. Graduating into the pandemic in 2020 was far from her original plan, but strangely enough, she says she isn't sure she would have gotten the part in Kimberly Akimbo if not for the world shutting down. Always worried about being a good student and finding herself getting in her head about her Senior Showcase, when the pandemic hit, she took a break from doing anything explicitly theater-related for close to a year. "I wasn't in Zoom dance class, I wasn't in Zoom voice lessons, I wasn't doing any of that. I just focused on other things in my life that I found enriching and tried to survive a global pandemic." In 2020, after reading with a close friend who was taping for Kimberly Akimbo, White felt she could do a good job with the material and use the tape to introduce herself ahead of her eventual move to New York City. But by the time 2021 came around and she was preparing to make the move, find a job as a nanny and figure out the way forward from there, nothing had come from it.

Welcome To New York (Nina's Version)
But things worked out, as they so often do. "One week before moving, I got an email (that actually went to junk!) from casting director Craig Burns." They loved her tape, but since it had been a year, asked if she would mind taping again. She sent in a new audition and moved to the city. "I started my lease June 1, and my in-person callback for Kimberly Akimbo was June 2. I got it on June 2, which was insane," she recalls. Speaking to the impact of the show—which won five Tony Awards in 2023, including Best Musical—White credits the creatives as well as star Victoria Clark's unwavering commitment to the craft. "It was not flashy, it was so heartfelt, but it also was not overly sentimental. Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire wrote a really incredible story and Jessica Stone directed it beautifully," White says. "She worked so hard to get the tone, the contrast between the comedy and the tragedy, dead on. The question that the show is asking, of what do you do and how would you feel if you knew concretely that your days were numbered...It was a very existential show, but wrapped up in this mundanity. They're in Jersey, her dad works at a gas station, but Kim is grappling with existentialism. I love Kimberly Akimbo, I could talk about it forever. It resonated with audiences because it's perfect!"

Coming Into Her Power
When White first encountered the material for The Queen of Versailles, auditioning on tape before a workshop, she admits she didn't believe she was right for the part of Jackie Siegel's (played by Kristin Chenoweth) daughter. "On paper, Rikki is really rebelling against her circumstances, and I am such a rule follower and a goody two shoes. I never even fought with my mom ever in my life until after graduating college," she says. "I remember being like, 'thank you guys for believing in me, but I don't think I'm your girl.' I believed in my heart and my skill that I could do a version of it, but it felt so far from me." It was learning the Stephen Schwartz-penned song "Pretty Wins" from score supervisor Joshua Zecher-Ross at the workshop that ultimately changed her mind. "The themes of that song are so universal, and yet it's not really a topic that you encounter in a musical," she says of her solo number. "I was very excited at the prospect that this show is delving into that, and I found the song very moving. The project in general I think is so fascinating, and the mother-daughter relationship is so fraught and heartbreaking, and it's very complicated. I am really excited that I get to be a part of a relationship like that on stage. I find it very rich."

Queens of the Stage
Just getting started in her career and having the opportunity to work with and learn from Clark in Kimberly Akimbo and now Chenoweth in Versailles doesn't cease to amaze White. "Vicki is an incredibly spiritual actor in a way that I really feel a kinship with," she gushes. "Vicki would do the show differently every single night. She did her homework so much that then she would just come in there and she was in the universal flow, fully present and fully committed. That takes so much energetic exertion and so much humility. She led the company in a way that was so kind and professional, and I could watch her forever. I would watch her every night in awe of her and her skill." Of course, White confirms that Chenoweth too is "unbelievable. She's a team player in a way that I admire so much. She's incredibly generous. It's no wonder that she's had the career that she's had, because she's kind, and she is about her work, and she's a dream coworker. I'm just watching and learning every day." It shows, and as White commands the stage at the St. James Theatre eight times a week, her own hard work and talent are what win.

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