Stage » The oft-quoted show business cliché is again relevant during a national epidemic.
Not even H1N1 can keep a strong woman down, says Fran Pruyn, director of “The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon — Second Helpings.” She’s referring to lead actor Charles Lynn Frost, who helped create the iconic character and was performing a successful reprisal last month, only to have been taken ill with pneumonia and complications from an infection with the H1N1 virus.
Ask theater producers about flu season and the national H1N1 emergency, and you’ll hear the old show-business cliché: The show must go on. After all, canceling or postponing a show translates to losing thousands of dollars and time already invested in the production, and disappointing time-starved audiences. It also can be complicated and expensive to reschedule a production in some of the city’s busiest small theaters.”The first recourse is always to try to fill the empty role and go on with the show,” said Pruyn, artistic director of Pygmalion Productions. “Frequently roles are shuffled or actors are brought in to step in the role.”
But in the case of “The Passion,” that wasn’t possible, as the show is built around Dottie, the Mormon housewife from Spanish Fork with a gay son. After Frost, who created the character with Troy Williams, was hospitalized, there was nothing left to do but cancel.
For the South Jordan Community Theatre and other community groups that work with large youth casts, H1N1 or other illnesses can prove disastrous. The young company had a brush with the flu virus last spring during a production of one of Utah’s favorite musicals, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“We were faced with this virus and the potential it could ruin our company,” said executive producer Kevin Dudley. As the cast prepared for the show’s dress rehearsal, the orchestra director came down with the illness.
Another potential disaster occurred on the last day of rehearsal, when the actor playing Joseph showed up wearing a boot and crutches — thankfully, just a prank. But the two incidents sparked the board of directors to come up with a plan, as Dudley explained: “a buffer against these types of tragedy in order to avoid financial ruin.”
For the company’s current run of “Annie,” scheduled for Nov. 13-24, an actor was selected to understudy the title role. In addition, the 80-member cast was divided into three performing groups, allowing the director to transfer different actors among the casts, as needed. That’s a change, as the company had resisted casting understudies because of the little time actors might have onstage. “We changed our policy as a direct result of the H1N1 virus and potential negative financial impact closing a show would have,” Dudley said.
The flu virus already has made appearances during rehearsal, as a couple of the leads have called in sick. With weeks to go before opening night, the staff is counting on a full recovery.
Actors who are feeling ill are encouraged to stay home, Dudley said, and like kid-oriented businesses throughout the Salt Lake Valley, the theater troupe has invested in hand sanitizer and encourages frequent hand washing and directing coughs into elbows at rehearsals. “For us, the bottom line is: The show must go on,” Dudley said.
Planning ahead for illness isn’t just a potential headache for small theaters. At the state’s oldest professional company, producers rely on understudies, creative staging and planning ahead.
Canceling a show is rare; according to PTC managing director Chris Lino, that’s only happened twice in more than 40 years of productions. Once in the 1980s, a lead actor got sick, and there was no understudy for the production, and then once in 2007, power went out in the building for an evening.
For PTC’s current show, Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?,” which opened Oct. 30 and plays through Nov. 14, there are no understudies for the cast of 11. “In a case like this, unless the actor is going to hurt himself, even if he is sick, he goes on,” Lino said, quoting artistic director Charles Morey.
In general, actors are conscientious about staying healthy despite the demands of performing regularly. Yet Jerry Rapier, producing director for Plan-B Theatre Company, wisecracks that he has become the official stand-in for sassy gay or Japanese male characters. Joking aside, neither of his experiences of replacing an actor has been funny, he added.
In 2006, he directed “Love! Valour! Compassion!” for Wasatch Theatre Company. In the last week of the run, actor Eric Tierney was hospitalized, and the director stood in for his character, with a script in hand. Tierney, 26, died suddenly of liver failure just hours after the play closed.
Earlier this year, Rapier stood in for actor Bryan Kido after his lung collapsed during the second week of the run of “Block 8,” and the actor was hospitalized. Again with script in hand, the director played the role. “We kept hoping he could at least do the final performance, but his other lung collapsed, and he was in and out of the hospital through the summer,” Rapier said. “It has to be something that’s drastic for them not to go on.”
Recent Comments