What was the story with "Lips Together Teeth Apart?"

Megan threw a royal bitch fit to Roundabout about Patton not being good enough and that she wanted him replaced. Roundabout stuck to their guns and Megan walked because they wouldn't replace him. And then we got the treasure that is Everyday Rapture on Broadway, so thank you Megan. :)

http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/10-2012/dont-go-gentles-david-wilson-barnes-talks-his-indi_63450.html

As David Wilson Barnes confirms, the urban legend of Mullally quitting because of Patton Oswalt is completely untrue. Like Barnes says in that article, she had a lot of things going on in her personal life that were causing varying degrees of understandable problems for her at the time. What he doesn't mention specifically is that chief among them was her mother's failing health.

What I've always heard is that Mullally butted heads with Joe Mantello pretty much right away. Mantello has a reputation for sometimes being abrasive with actors, and when Mullally brought her concerns about him to Roundabout, they were largely unresponsive (in her eyes.) As things got worse, she felt like it was clear Roundabout wouldn't be stepping in to support her, so she decided it was no longer worth it to stay in such a combative environment when she was already feeling tremendous guilt about being separated from her mother during the final months of her life. With that, she left rehearsal one day and never went back, and the rest is history.

I'm not defending what Mullally did, but certain people I know who were inside that production have maintained that she wasn't as in the wrong as she was made to be in the press at the time. Many think that the entire fictionalized story of a feud between her and Oswalt was generated by Roundabout themselves in order to alleviate them from any potential blame if it surfaced that her issues were related to their misconduct and not another actor's.

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Updated On: 11/3/12 at 01:37 AM

So, ROUNDABOUT threw Megan "under the bus" ?
I never heard she was difficult, but I have heard Mantello could be cruel (in a Jerome Robbins way).
Was
Patton the Patsy?

CPD, I don't know if I'd say Roundabout threw her under the bus, exactly, but they certainly took advantage of the situation in a way that wasn't entirely unbiased.

It remains that Mullally chose to break an existing contract and initiated a sequence of events that ultimately cost the other members of the cast and the crew their jobs. However, her doing so because she was subjected to an environment in the rehearsal room in which she felt unsafe and unsupported is wildly different from her wanting another actor fired and quitting when she didn't get her way. It's certainly more advantageous to Roundabout if people believe the latter story, since that leaves them completely in the right, whereas their mismanagement is heavily at fault if they failed to properly address an actor's concerns.

I also think it's absurd that the show wasn't just re-cast and mounted anyway. The set was partially built and the run was heavily sold with subscription ticket holders. It wasn't like this was a commercial production and Mullally was a big enough star that the entire financial livelihood of the show depended on her, so the fact that they chose to just cut their losses and scrap the whole thing (which wasn't cheap to do) should be pretty telling about the extent of the problems behind the scenes.

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Updated On: 11/3/12 at 02:24 AM