Pity the Poor Understudy

Hi Shekarpanir. That was an interesting discussion about amplification, wasn't it?

I've been thinking about bree's comment:
"I'm also glad the actor who refused to be miked wasn't appearing in a musical."

And that led me to thinking about understudies.

"Steve Martin once explained why he once felt compelled to show up for a performance despite a killer flu: "If people pay to see Bozo the Clown and he's not there, they're furious. It doesn't matter that they get Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Barbra Streisand to fill in. People would still say, 'Damn it! We paid to see Bozo!'"

And I remembered the two understudies (Shirley Jones (Oklahoma) and Shirley Maclaine (Pajama Game) I saw take over when the leads couldn't perform in Pittsburgh and who immediately became stars. (I know - I've told that story many times here, but.....) and I became curious as to how many understudies really made it big. I didn't have any luck googling on that subject, however, I did come across this article which I thought was interesting:


"The arts column: understudies step into the limelight at last
(Filed: 31/12/2003)
(Filed: 31/12/2003)

Rupert Christiansen on why things are looking up for the unsung heroes of the stage

Pity the poor understudy, waiting in vain for flu or a manhole to floor Sir Rufus or Dame Ethel and let someone else prove that they could do the big speech so much better. It's always been a frustrating, humiliating job, eight parts boredom to two parts fantasising, and the pay is scarcely enough for the bus fare home.

Frequent absentee: Martine McCutcheon

But someone has to do the dirty work, and at last this Cinderella of the theatrical profession has found her Fairy Godmother. The RSC's new director, Michael Boyd, has waved his magic wand and decreed that she shall go the ball - every understudy at Stratford is now contractually guaranteed at least one full public performance per production.
As a morale booster, this seems to me both humane and practical, and it is also evidence of a new trend that brings the understudy out of the dressing room and into the spotlight.
The old school of understudy is exemplified by the record-breaking Nancy Seabrooke, who, between 1979 and 1994, attended the theatre ready to perform the role of Mrs Boyle in The Mousetrap 6,240 times. She went on 72 times, or about once every three months, which is actually pretty good going. By theatrical tradition, she could leave the building only after her character had made her final entrance: the rest of the time - about 16,000 hours - she spent on her petit-point.
This is in many respects an expensive, wasteful system. The tendency nowadays is for small-cast productions to have no understudies at all: if someone goes off, the show is simply cancelled. Larger-scale productions - musicals and Shakespeare, for example - use the bit-part players or chorus members and juggle the cast tactically. (If Fourth Citizen is suddenly promoted to Coriolanus, then Second Citizen can double up as Fourth.)
Another strategy is the substitution of an unrehearsed actor who walks through the role, reciting off a copy of the script. I once saw an extraordinary performance of Othello, in which Sylvestra le Touzel "read" Desdemona for Imogen Stubbs and made the character's absorption in a paperback a dimension of her innocence of her husband's state of mind.
Even more bizarre was the round of theatrical chairs in an all-female Taming of the Shrew at Bankside Globe I saw in September. Amanda Harris had already stepped into the role of Hortensio, when Kathryn Hunter, playing Katherine, collapsed in the middle of the scene. Harris, who had played Katherine at Stratford, took over brilliantly, leaving someone else to take over Hortensio, and someone else to take over from her. The result was one of the most electrifying pieces of on-the-edge farce I have ever witnessed.
Musicals, where the accident and illness rate is high, nowadays take elaborate precautions. Anything Goes, for instance, has two sets of alternative casts, entirely drawn from the company. Lessons were learnt from the fiasco of My Fair Lady, where Martine McCutcheon's understudy Alexandra Jay, and her understudy Kerry Ellis, ended up doing more Elizas than she did. A far cry from the great Mary Martin, who in the 1950s washed that man right out of her hair more than 2,000 times in South Pacific and never missed a single shampoo - without benefit of miking.

Today's musical stars rarely contract to do eight shows a week, and it's increasingly common for the understudy to be scheduled to take over a matinee or a Tuesday evening - an erosion, old lags grumble, of the iron show-must-go-on discipline that has traditionally been the profession's cardinal virtue. Whatever became of the magic of Doctor Theatre, whereby an actor would struggle on with a temperature of 104, give a gay performance and then collapse in a heap after curtain-fall? Anything rather than let the bloody understudy go on.
There are two other mythologies surrounding the understudy. One is the last-minute drama, of which many tales are told. For example, in a recent performance of Cymbeline at Stratford, James Staddon stunned himself by walking into a door, and, on the lightning orders of the stage manager, his understudy Oliver Maltman was on stage delivering Jupiter's peroration within 20 seconds.
Alan Bennett once took over in The Lady in the Van when Nicholas Farrell's wife suddenly went into labour. What made this piquant was that Bennett had written the play himself, and Farrell's role was that of The Author.
The other is the All About Eve thing: the understudy (in the movie, Anne Baxter) who takes over and trumps the star (Bette Davis). Actually, it doesn't often happen, because the taking-over is usually so hurried that there's no time to invite agents, critics and opinion-formers to see the show - which is one reason why the RSC's scheduled understudy performance, properly publicised and inexpensively priced, is such an excellent idea."

And was just wondering if you'd rather see a show cancelled or see an understudy take over when you've paid big bucks to see a particular performer.