Meet the Broadway Icons of Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’

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Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl dropped on October 3rd, and it includes plenty of references—some explicit and some ambiguous—to real showgirls throughout history. Many of these women have a Broadway past worth exploring that adds new context to Swift’s songs.

The single from The Life of a Showgirl is its first track, “The Fate of Ophelia”. Swift has always loved exploring Shakespearean characters and other elements in her work and this time, she shines the light on Ophelia from Hamlet. 

In Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare around 1600, Ophelia is driven crazy and eventually to death by the actions of the men in her life, including her love interest Hamlet, her father Polonius, and her brother Laertes. Their selfish, power-hungry, and unhinged behaviors lead to Hamlet eventually telling Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery”. That and her father’s death drive Ophelia to death by drowning. The character’s tragic end inspired a famous 1850s painting of Ophelia, by Sir John Everett Millais. Swift drew on the events of the play as well as the painting for inspiration in her song about narrowly avoiding “The Fate of Ophelia”. 

The historic Beekman Hotel in lower Manhattan is on the footprint of what was in 1761 the Chapel Street Theatre. The Chapel is where Hamlet first premiered in New York City, 264 years ago. Since its premiere, Hamlet has been seen on Broadway 65 additional times; this doesn’t count all of the play’s off- and off-off-Broadway productions as well as adaptations like the musical Rockabye Hamlet, where Ophelia strangled herself with her own microphone cord!

Among those who have played Ophelia on Broadway over the years are Julia Marlowe (six times starting in 1904),  Ethel Barrymore (1925), Lillian Gish (1936), and Elizabeth McGovern (1992). In 1964, a famed revival starring Richard Burton in the title role opened on Broadway just three weeks after Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor, namesake of the second track on The Life of a Showgirl.

But “The Fate of Ophelia” is influenced by the life of several showgirls, not just the character of Ophelia in Hamlet. In Swift’s music video for the song, she pays homage to Marilyn Monroe, a real-life show business legend who, like Ophelia, also met a tragic end. In a blonde bobbed wig and red sparkling gown, Swift takes the viewer backstage, invoking the image of the showgirl who spent time in the theatre, including studying at The Actors Studio, before catapulting to Hollywood stardom. While Monroe never appeared on Broadway, she has certainly been immortalized there, including in Marilyn: An American Fable (1983) as well as the recent Smash (2025). 

In “The Fate of Ophelia” we also get Swift paying tribute to Ronnie Spector, lead singer of the Ronettes and a pioneer of girl groups and rock and roll. Swift is flanked by two other female singers, enacting synchronized choreography, as they perform in a nightclub setting, bringing to mind the iconic work of the Ronettes. The stylized 1960s-1970s aesthetic of the sequence reflects the era of peak popularity for Spector and for the Ronettes. 

One of the songs that the Ronettes made famous was “Be My Baby”, written by Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry, and Phil Spector (before he married Ronnie). This song is also referenced in track three of The Life of a Showgirl, “Opalite”, where Swift’s music pays homage to the girl group sound of 1960s showgirls as well as “Be My Baby” specifically. “Be My Baby” and a number of other songs that Spector made famous were heard in the ahead-of-its-time Broadway jukebox musical about Ellie Greenwich, Leader of the Pack (1985). Greenwich was a leading songwriter of the Brill Building during its heyday; Swift has also publicly expressed her admiration for Carole King who was part of this history as well.

Also referenced in “The Fate of Ophelia” music video is showgirl Esther Williams. Williams, nicknamed “the million dollar mermaid”, was a swimming performer who appeared on stage and screen in the 1940s and 1950s, acting as well as swimming. Billy Rose was not only a Broadway impresario and one-time husband of Fanny Brice; he also built Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a touring spectacular featuring swimming pool entertainment, which Williams starred in. She was discovered there and went on to star in a series of MGM musicals, including playing herself in the 1945 film of The Ziegfeld Follies. Williams worked several times with iconic 42nd Street choreographer Busby Berkeley, known for his overhead perspectives of synchronized showgirls. Imagery in “The Fate of Ophelia” music video pays tribute to this collaboration.  

Elizabeth Taylor is one of the most iconic women in the history of show business. In the second track on The Life of a Showgirl, named after the star, Swift draws parallels between her own life and that of Taylor, including their shared history of making headlines with their love lives. The violet-eyed, eight-times-married Taylor made two appearances on Broadway, both in the 1980s. Taylor made her Broadway debut starring in a revival of The Little Foxes in 1981 and then co-starred with her then-ex husband Richard Burton in Private Lives in 1983. 

Taylor and Burton’s tumultuous romance included two marriages and two divorces. When the two shared the stage in Noël Coward’s popular comedy of manners, they had already divorced for the second time. The divorced characters they played seemed to imitate their own lives, even though Coward had written Private Lives five decades earlier. While this production at the Lunt-Fontanne was the only time Taylor and Burton starred together on Broadway, they also spent a significant amount of time together around Broadway at the same theater. When Burton starred in the previously mentioned 1964 production of Hamlet weeks after he and Taylor were married for the first time, she was there in the wings. As Swift writes, Taylor wanted Burton to “be my NY when Hollywood hates me”. Indeed because of Burton’s Broadway role, Taylor came to New York, following some of the cruelest headlines of her career. Both Elizabeth Taylor and Taylor Swift have dealt with harsh scrutiny from the media.

In The Life of a Showgirl’s most sexually explicit track, “Wood”, Swift evokes the 1979 disco version by Amii Stewart of the song “Knock on Wood” written by Eddie Floyd and Stephen Lee Cropper. In Stewart’s music video of the song with the lyric, “It's like thunder, lightning/ The way you love me is frightening/ You better knock, knock, knock on wood, baby”, she is decked out in disco- infused showgirl regalia, including a neon gown and headdress. While Stewart may never have appeared on Broadway, the song “Knock on Wood” was part of the 2016 musical comedy Disaster!, which was stuffed with 1970s hits.  

Swift has frequently shared her love for her maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, who was a showgirl herself. Finlay’s career included touring as a singer, releasing an album, and performing in opera houses, concert halls, and supper clubs, as well as on television and radio. Finlay has been a constant inspiration for Swift, who wrote the song “Marjorie” about her and credits her with being the reason Swift pursued a career in music. Swift also played a fictional version of her grandmother in the music video for “Wildest Dreams” and referenced her in “Timeless”. 

The Life of a Showgirl brings another tribute to Finlay and her life in show business. While the character of Kitty, referenced in the album’s title song, is a fictional showgirl, the music video for “The Fate of Ophelia” shows a clapboard that tells the audience that the name of Swift’s character in the song is Kitty Finlay. Marjorie’s picture is also hung on the dressing room mirror. This connection means that the main character sung about in the final track is partially inspired by Marjorie Finlay. 

While Finlay may not have performed on Broadway, she performed plenty of Broadway songs during her showgirl years. In the early 1950s, Finlay performed with an all-girl orchestra called Music with the Girls, broadcast by CBS, under her maiden name Marjorie Moehlenkamp. On an occasion when her act included Rodgers and Hart’s “My Heart Stood Still” from A Connecticut Yankee, the Shreveport Times critic described her simply as “lovely”. (His characterization seems to have been meant “legitly” and not in the backhanded way that Swift details in her song “Honey”.) When Moehlenkamp performed with Music with the Girls, they frequently regaled audiences with Broadway’s latest hits. One that she performed was “I’ll Buy You a Star” from A Tree Goes in Brooklyn, just after that show had opened on Broadway.  

The album’s title track has also been hypothesized to be inspired at least in part by Britney Spears. Swift was a huge fan of Spears when she was growing up. As a young teenager, before even releasing her first album, Swift had the opportunity to go backstage at a Britney Spears concert and meet her idol. She even played Spears an early song on her guitar. Years later, Spears posted a throwback picture of her and young Swift from this night, praising her and her work. Swift returned the kind words on several occasions, including in interviews during the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards, when she remembered how kind Spears was to her when she was starting out and told the press she was rooting for her. A number of lyrics in “The Life of a Showgirl” could refer to Spears’ life and career and the name “Kitty” even sounds like a stand-in for “Britney”. 

While Spears never appeared on Broadway, she was in shows as a young girl, including the musical Ruthless! off-Broadway, and her songs have been featured in Broadway musicals including Once Upon a One More Time (2023) and the currently running & Juliet (2022). There’s an additional connection since & Juliet centers on the work of Max Martin, co-producer and co-writer of The Life of a Showgirl. Martin collaborated on many of Spears’ biggest hits, including “…Baby One More Time”, and “Oops… I Did It Again”. 

Additionally, “The Life of a Showgirl” is a duet with Sabrina Carpenter. Carpenter opened for Swift on tour and before that, was a long time fan of hers, just as Swift was with Spears. Carpenter is now a pop star in her own right, currently on tour. Her seventh studio album was released earlier this year. As far as Broadway showgirl history, Carpenter occupies a unique place in theatre history. She starred in Mean Girls on Broadway for exactly two performances before Broadway shut down for over a year in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Carpenter was a replacement for the lead role of Cady Heron and performed in the musical for two days only, alongside fellow future pop star Reneé Rapp as frenemy Regina George.