One I forgot: I saw the Broadway revival of
Steel Magnolias during their last week of performances. Both Delta Burke and Rebecca Gayheart were out. (From what I understand, both women were out frequently: Burke for health problems and Gayheart because she was going back and forth to LA for TV work) No announcement was made, no slips in the program, and no board was posted. The lights just went up and Sally Mayes was sitting under the heat lamp instead of Burke. Anyway, she was excellent, as was Ginnifer King as Shelby (who also understudied Tammy Blanchard in GYPSY). I didn't see them, but I can't imagine Burke or Gayheart being any better. The rest of the cast--Christine Ebersole as M'Lynn; Franny Sternhagen as Clairee; Marsha Mason as Ouiser; and Lily Rabe, in her New York debut, as Annelle--were all wonderful. I think that production got a bad rap; I actually found it quite enjoyable. Maybe if the critics had seen it with Mayes and King instead of Burke and Gayheart that might have changed something.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body