The Seth Rudetsky Series starring Nina West

About the Event

The Seth Rudetsky Broadway Concert Series brings the biggest Broadway stars to the Virginia G. Piper Theater stage for an intimate concert and conversation featuring popular hits of the theatre and candid stories.     

Nina West is an American drag queen, actor, singer, songwriter, author, and LGBTQIA+ activist played by Andrew Levitt. She was named the “Most Googled Drag Queen in The World” from 2020–21 with more than 7.8 billion unique searches. She rose to national prominence in 2019 with her appearance on VH1’s Emmy®-winning show RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 11, where she placed sixth and won Miss Congeniality. In 2021, she returned to the show as a guest and was anointed “America’s Sweetheart” by RuPaul herself. She made history at the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards in September 2019 when she became the first person to walk the carpet in full drag, while her season won five Primetime Emmy Awards®, including Best Reality Competition Show. In 2020, West released a charity partnership with country music legend Dolly Parton—The “Dolly X Nina: Kindness is Queen ” Collection—with all proceeds going to the Dolly Parton Imagination Library and The Nina West Foundation to benefit LGBTQIA+ youth and literacy. In 2021, she partnered with Nickelodeon and Blue’s Clues for a series of Pride videos that went viral with more than 2 million views. Nina hosted the first Disney+ This Is Me: PRIDE Celebration Spectacular, a celebration of the LGBTQIA+ community with Disney classics reinterpreted by LGBTQIA+ artists like Hayley Kiyoko, Todrick Hall, and Alex Newell. She returned to the show in 2022 and performed with Disney Legend Alan Menken in a tribute to Disney Legend Howard Ashman. West is currently headlining the brand-new national tour of the Broadway musical Hairspray in the lead role of Edna Turnblad, for which she has received rave reviews. She has played more than 350 shows to over 600,000 people nationwide. 

Seth Rudetsky is the afternoon host on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio’s On Broadway and the host of Seth Speaks on Sirius/XM Stars. As an author, he penned My Awesome/Awful Popularity Plan and the sequel The Rise and Fall of a Theater Geek (Random House), as well as three volumes of Seth’s Broadway Diary, featuring inside scoops and hilarious stories from all the stars he’s worked with. He co-wrote and co-starred in Disaster! (The New York Times “critics pick”), which also premiered to rave reviews in London. In June 2016, he and his husband, James Wesley, co-produced a recording of “What the World Needs Now” with stars like Idina Menzel, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Carole King, and Audra McDonald. The recording went to #1 on iTunes and raised more than $100,000 for victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Rudetsky and Wesley’s foundation Your Kids Our Kids presented Concert for America—a nationwide series featuring stars like Barry Manilow, Keala Settle, Stephanie Mills, Vanessa Williams, Billy Porter, Randy Rainbow, and Audra McDonald that raised money for five nonprofits. They also present Voices for The Voiceless, a yearly star-studded concert for You Gotta Believe that helps older foster children find families, even if they’ve aged out of the system. SiriusXM/Pandora also carries Rudetsky’s first podcast series, Seth Rudetsky’s Back To School, where he interviews stars about the ups and (hilarious) downs of their high school years. The first two seasons include Tina Fey, Bowen Yang, Allison Janney, Vanessa Willams, and many more. When Broadway shut down, Rudetsky and Wesley started hosting and producing Stars in the House, a twice-daily livestream that has featured many Broadway stars and reunions of television show casts from The West Wing, Scandal, Frasier, and E.R., raising more than $1 million for The Actors Fund. They also joined Marlo Thomas and co-produced new versions of “Free to Be You and Me” with Sara Bareilles and “Sisters and Brothers” with the Broadway Inspirational Voices, donating profits to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Find out more about Rudetsky, and watch his signature “deconstructions,” at SethRudetsky.com. 

Signature Partner