Well, the Tony Awards are right around the corner. I mean, right around the corner. And once again, there are no categories for understudies.
No categories for whom, you ask? For understudies. So here’s the deal. Understudies are those actors who stand by in case one of the principal actors, or more, is unable to perform. No understudy equals no show. There are the occasional exceptions but 99.44% of the time, understudies are the deal. That’s who we’re talking about here.
As a for instance, I went to see Death Becomes Her a few months ago. What I did not realize, until I bothered to look at the insert in my program at intermission, was that the three principal roles I was watching were being performed by understudies. I’d received an email about an hour before I got to the theater, giving me permission to cancel. But what the heck? Why not support the understudies? Because these three actors were superb in every way. There was no announcement made, no signage, just a program insert that people like me would ignore while they went ahead to enjoy the show, thinking they were seeing the A-team. And of course, they were watching an A-team.
Quick glance through these bios revealed a seven-year run as Elphaba in Wicked, a role in the original Kimberly Akimbo as well as Limpeca and Once on This Island. These are pros in every way. They have to be. They have to land the funny lines, weep the truest tears, sing the craziest lyrics, and walk, talk, and chew gum at the same time.
They cannot afford to miss a beat because the audience and the rest of the cast is depending on them to hold the show together. Get it? even when they are operating on short, and I do mean short notice.
Sure, they rehearse. They rehearse a lot. But rehearsing a lot is not the same as arriving at the theater to be greeted by, good evening, you’re going on tonight, get yourself to wardrobe and get your costume going.
So, here’s the question. To this you should pay attention. Why are there no Tony Awards for understudies?
Understudies did get some love at the 2022 awards because it was the understudies who kept Broadway breathing as we emerged from the pandemic. These days, understudies are appearing on a regular basis because somebody figured out that the toll of eight shows a week, especially for a musical, is physically demanding. Like Luke Evans uses small doses of canned oxygen backstage for his performance as Frankenfurter in the Rocky Horror Show.
Actors are athletes, folks, and some of them are doing it backwards in six-inch heels. Sure, sure, those of us in the audience can think, what’s the big deal with the regular cast showing up the way we expect them to? Eight shows a week at two hours per show, that’s 16 hours of work. Come on, it can’t be so tiring. Well, as a matter of fact, it can. Listen, for every minute on stage, every minute on stage, every actor, understudy or not, spends a minimum of four hours in rehearsal. Why? Because they all have to rehearse until they cannot get it wrong. No matter what happens at a given show.
Remember, actors are flying without a net, even when there’s no understudy stepping in. It’s every actor’s job to hit every mark, every note, and deliver the goods every time. So, not only can it be a physical challenge, it is a mental and spiritual one as well.
Having an understudy step in adds another layer of complication, shared by the rest of the cast, who have to rehearse with and accommodate this new person, this wonderful understudy. And then, there’s the domino effect. When the understudy leaves the role she was playing, her understudy, the next person in the food chain, steps in, leaving a vacancy in her wake that will continue all the way down the line until the replacements in that lineage are, well, in place.
And somehow, the theater companies make it work. In case you’re interested, there’s a website called understudies.org where you can go see if there are scheduled understudies going on for a show on a given day. And you can also find the understudy Hall of Fame moments all over the web. Shirley MacLaine, Sutton Foster, Danny Burstein, or how about the time when an understudy left a show and her understudy got COVID, so the new understudy went on carrying a script. Or when Julie Benko performed as Fanny Bryce for a third of the Funny Girl performances. And a couple of years ago, one Broadway actor missed almost half of the first 100 performances of a hit show.
Look, why actors are missing shows, that’s their business. But the people who step into their shoes deserve more than a pat on the back and a thank you so much. They deserve recognition and a big fat award, or maybe you could call it a reward. You know, just like all their fellow actors get. You know, those people on the A-teams. Come on, American Theater Wing and the Broadway League, belly up to the bar, Tony’s for understudies, period, full stop.
Oh, and P.S., while we’re at it, what sort of recognition are we giving to the camera operators now that we have gone digital and screens are taking over the stage? In The Portrait of Dorian Gray, there were 15 technical performers doing everything from holding a steadicam to assisting Sarah Snook to transform from one of her 26 characters into another. Sarah Snook got a Tony. Technical staff got a big thank you.
So, next time you go to a show, open your program to the cast list page. Note the understudies just below that and the technical staff on the same page. See if you can connect the dots. How many roles have more than one understudy? How many of the understudies are covering more than one part? Yeah, go figure that one out. Then, vision an enormous flow chart. That’s something like a family tree. You know, where Aunt Ginny was married to James, who was the son of her father’s second cousin. That did not turn out so well… You get the picture.
What goes on behind that curtain is more complicated than any story that is being told up front. And at the center of it all are the understudies, who, as I have said, deserve an entire Tony category, or maybe 12, all their own. Understudies. Think about it.
