In the Broadway musical “Dear Evan Hansen,” Jessica Leigh Phillips played a single mother trying to support her anxious teenage son as he navigated a life of self-acceptance.
The role overlapped with a subconscious struggle for acceptance in Ms. Phillips’s own life. When she began the national tour in 2018, she had been married to her second husband for a year. When the show closed because of the pandemic in 2020, the actress, 52, was in the middle of a journey toward accepting her feelings for Chelsea Blair Nachman.
Ms. Nachman, 35, is a theatrical publicist. She and Ms. Phillips met on July 2, 2017, when Ms. Nachman went to see “Deathless,” a musical Ms. Phillips was starring in at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn. Ms. Nachman, who was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was there to see a pair of actor friends who were also in the performance. Over dinner at a local restaurant, the co-stars bumped into one another.
“Jess happened to be at the next table,” Ms. Nachman said. “When my friends introduced me, I immediately turned to them and said, ‘I can’t look directly at her.’ There was some overtaking force. It was kind of overwhelming to me.”
Ms. Phillips, who then lived in Harlem, was struck just as forcefully later that night when she ran into Ms. Nachman after curtain call. “She was in tears,” Ms. Phillips said. “It was a very emotional show.” Once they started talking, Ms. Phillips said, “There was a spark right from the beginning that felt kind of unexplainable.”
Ms. Phillips has two adult sons, Jonah and Malcolm, from a first marriage to the lawyer Nicholas H. Rohlfing. At the time, she was engaged to Tad Wilson, also an actor. “He was a wonderful man and it was a good relationship,” she said. But the attraction to Ms. Nachman, who had never been married, was undeniable. After the Connecticut meet-up, and after Ms. Phillips married Mr. Wilson, “we started hanging out,” Ms. Nachman said. “And then just cosmically, Jess was cast in the national tour of a show I was representing, ‘Dear Evan Hansen.’”
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Their mutual attraction did not go unacknowledged. Both women brought it up almost immediately, Ms. Nachman said. Early in the marriage, Ms. Phillips, who had never been romantically involved with a woman before, told Mr. Wilson about her feelings for Ms. Nachman. After deciding to open their marriage, the three of them worked to live inside a complicated situation with trust, respect and honesty.
After “Dear Evan Hansen” shut down during the pandemic, Ms. Phillips moved to Los Angeles to film a TV series, “Why Women Kill,” and cut off communication with Ms. Nachman. “I put our friendship on pause, and I spent six months doing kind of a personal walkabout,” she said. Taking the space to get honest with herself was, at times, painful and scary. “But it felt like it was the healthiest thing I could do for myself,” she said.
Ms. Nachman, who grew up in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., and has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Michigan, was heartbroken. But from the start, she said, the relationship was “not linear and a little messy. No one wanted to pressure the other.”
By spring 2021, Ms. Phillips, who was born in Nashville and has a bachelor of fine arts degree in theater from Emerson College, had reached the sense of acceptance similar to what her “Dear Evan Hansen” character wanted for her son. In late April, she returned to New York. On May 4, she texted Ms. Nachman, who had moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn.
“I would like to see you,” she said. During a walk through Prospect Park, they reconnected. “It was like no time had passed, but I had also missed her so much,” Ms. Nachman said. Each, unbeknown to the other, had been writing to each other in journals. “It became a little daily diary for myself, like, ‘I hope you’re having a good day,’” Ms. Nachman said.
By the end of the year, Ms. Phillips and Mr. Wilson were divorced. The year before, what she thought would be a difficult conversation with her sons, about falling in love with Ms. Nachman, had proved otherwise. “Both of them kind of threw their arms around me and said, ‘We want you to be happy, mom,’” she said.
In the summer of 2022, Ms. Nachman moved into Ms. Phillips’s Harlem apartment. A year later, they bought a house together in South Orange, N.J. This past February they started talking about what their future might look like. “We decided we would very much like to be married,” Ms. Nachman said. Their dual proposals happened a week apart, in separate cities.
On April 15, at an empty Signature Theater in Washington, where Ms. Phillips was performing in the play “Penelope,” Ms. Phillips serenaded Ms. Nachman with a rendition of Elton John’s “Your Song” accompanied by a five-piece string band. She then brought Ms. Nachman onstage and proposed.
On April 22, during a drive for Passover Seder with her family, Ms. Nachman pulled over at Prospect Park, where their friend the singer/songwriter Ingrid Michaelson was waiting to sing them an acoustic version of “Love Is,” her single with Jason Mraz. This time, it was Ms. Nachman who popped the question, and Ms. Phillips who cried.
On Sept. 20, they were married by Michael A. White, the senior rabbi at Temple Sinai in Roslyn, N.Y., in their South Orange backyard.
Among their 50 guests were the actors Jarrod Spector, a Tony Award nominee, and his wife, Kelli Barrett; Lora Lee Gayer; and Jenifer Foote; and Ms. Michaelson. Those performer friends and others are expected at a November celebration in Brooklyn they’re calling their “Broadway Opening Night Party.” They hope it will double as a party for the country’s first woman president.
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