Vivacity Media Group: The NYC Broadway PR Firm With 70+ Productions on Record

Edited on July 18, 2026.

Vivacity Media Group is the New York-based independent Broadway PR firm founded by Leslie Papa and Whitney Holden Gore — two former Hartman Group press agents whose combined portfolio spans more than 70 theatrical productions across Broadway, Off-Broadway, and national tours. Vivacity is one of the narrow tier of specialist firms that handle the specific PR discipline of theatrical publicity in the country's largest performing-arts market.

Why Broadway PR is a distinct specialty

Broadway is a $1.8 billion annual industry — the 2018–2019 season closed at $1.83 billion in gross ticket sales and 14.77 million in attendance. But the closure rate is unforgiving: 16 shows in one recent season closed before opening night, and 23 closed the week they opened. Filling a Broadway theater consistently requires operators who understand the theater press corps, the awards-season calendar, the marketing coordination with producers and general managers, and the specific TV and morning-show ecosystem that drives ticket velocity.

Generalist entertainment PR firms cannot run this playbook. Broadway is one of the smallest press ecosystems in American entertainment coverage, and every relationship compounds. The specialist firms — Vivacity, the Hartman Group (from which Vivacity's principals came), Boneau/Bryan-Brown, DKC/O&M, Polk & Co. — operate on decades of theater-critic and theater-press relationships that a competitor cannot replicate on a two-year runway.

Principals

Leslie Papa — President

Former Senior Account Executive at the Hartman Group, where she managed PR campaigns for Broadway, Off-Broadway, and national-tour productions including Rock of Ages, On Your Feet, Bring It On, American Idol, Legally Blonde, the 2012 revival of Evita, Jagged Little Pill, Little Shop of Horrors, and Slava's Snow Show. Papa's practice extends beyond theater into television and entertainment PR — including work on SMASH, Grease: You're the One That I Want, The Search for Elf Woods, and MTV's Legally Blonde special.

Whitney Holden Gore — Vice President

Former press agent at the Hartman Group. Prior to that, Senior Publicist at Cohn Dutcher Associates, where she managed the New York Pops, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, the Caramoor International Music Festival, and the Ravinia Festival in Chicago. Gore's classical-music and performing-arts pedigree layers on top of the theatrical practice.

Coverage Track Record

Vivacity's client work has anchored coverage across the tier-one national outlets:

Print: Time, Forbes, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal.

Television and streaming: The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Today, Good Morning America, ET, NPR, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, America's Got Talent, Fox Sports, The View, Elvis Duran, Dancing with the Stars, Live with Kelly and Ryan.

That mix is the exact media stack that drives Broadway ticket sales. The tier-one morning-show placements and late-night appearances translate directly into next-day box-office lift.

Where Vivacity fits in the Broadway PR landscape

Broadway is one of the most concentrated PR ecosystems in American entertainment. The category is dominated by a handful of specialist firms with multi-decade critic and press-corps relationships. Vivacity's differentiation inside that set is the founding-team Hartman Group pedigree and the classical-music and performing-arts extension Gore brings to the practice.

For the broader entertainment PR landscape, see the Entertainment, Sports & Culture section of the PR Firms Directory.

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