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. “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 had remarried, “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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