It can be curtains with no backups on the bench

When Wayne Brady, the actor and TV talk-show host, strained his voice and had to drop out of the recent run of “Chicago” at the Pantages Theatre, the usual machinery of show business clicked smoothly into action.

His understudy went on as Billy Flynn for the first performance, a preview. By the following night, a seasoned leading man, Gregory Harrison, was playing the slick lawyer. It was the usual drill, the mandatory way of managing things for Broadway shows and their touring offshoots -- entertainments organized with profit in mind and a keep-the-customers-satisfied commitment to fulfilling the expectation that “the show must go on.”

But when the same scenario plays out at America’s nonprofit regional theaters, many are caught unprepared. The result can be helter-skelter improvisation, actors sucking it up to go on sick or injured, or even cancellations, as ticket holders arrive to find that “the show must go on” doesn’t universally apply in the tightly budgeted nonprofit world.

That’s because understudies, those typically little-used but occasionally crucial spare parts of the stage, are optional equipment for most nonprofit theaters, and many choose to forgo the expense of hiring them.

Even some of the most esteemed regional houses, including South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa and Center Theatre Group’s newly launched Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, would rather gamble by going “uncovered” than pay understudies tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a season to turn “the show must go on” into an ironclad promise.

“It costs a lot of money to understudy a show. Money is in short supply,” says Martin Benson, South Coast Repertory’s artistic director. Doing without understudies clearly is a risk, he says, “but [the need] so rarely occurs that it’s not a significant problem.”

Still, some regional theaters continue to take the promise of a show literally; to them, canceled performances or script-in-hand makeshifts are anathema, regardless of the financial strains of buying insurance in the form of understudies.

“People have a baby-sitter, they go out to dinner, and they come to the show. We have to put on a show,” says Gilbert Cates, producing director of the Geffen Playhouse.

The Geffen, like many nonprofit theaters that hire understudies, tries to use cheaper nonunion actors as subs if it can find qualified ones.

Even so, when it recently mounted “Paint Your Wagon,” the Geffen’s bill for five understudies (only one a member of Actors’ Equity) came to about $20,000, according to Artistic Manager Mary Garrett.

Understudies also give regional theaters an extra chip to play in attracting actors who love the stage but make their primary livings from better-paying film and television gigs. An actor committed to some brief screen work during the run of a play can accept the stage part with the understanding that any missed performances will be covered.

Theaters without understudies have three basic options when an actor can’t perform: scramble to hire somebody who already knows the part, cancel the show, or compromise by sending in an actor who reads from a script while everybody else tries to carry on as usual. The Laguna Playhouse found another approach when veteran L.A. actress Pamela Gordon’s health failed -- she subsequently died -- during a 2003 staging of “Harvey”: Her small part as a society matron was deleted.

SCR’s managing director, Paula Tomei, estimates the theater has had about a dozen script-in-hand emergencies during her 25 years there. One came last October, when Christopher Reeve suddenly was hospitalized in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and his actress wife, Dana, raced to his bedside before his death, missing the two final performances of “Brooklyn Boy.”

Sometimes union, sometimes not

The economics of understudying vary with each situation. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, like L.A.’s Center Theatre Group and a handful of other large companies, is required by contract to hire understudies for main stage productions and to exclusively use union actors. The Guthrie pays about $330,000 a year for understudies, says Managing Director Thomas Proehl.

At the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Associate General Manager Deb Clapp estimates the annual understudy bill at $30,000 to $35,000, kept down because the theater draws from the ample nonunion actor pool of a city known for its small-theater scene. The La Jolla Playhouse spent $40,000 for understudies in 2004.

In New Haven, Conn., not abounding with accomplished local actors, the Long Wharf Theatre does without understudies; the alternative, estimates Managing Director Michael Stotts, would be to spend $220,000 in annual salary and benefits to entice union talent from New York.

The League of Resident Theatres represents most of the regionals in labor negotiations. Of the 16 LORT companies in the West that have a choice about understudies, eight do not hire them. Three of the six theaters that use understudies rely mainly on unpaid graduate acting students -- among them San Diego’s Old Globe. The other two companies, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Pasadena Playhouse, decide on a show-by-show basis.

Regional theaters typically have budgets of $5 million or more and must raise large sums to close gaps between their operating costs and box office returns. It’s not uncommon to run deficits when the economy tanks or goes tepid. Hence the incentive to cut all unnecessary costs -- and the inclination of many to put understudies in the “unnecessary” category.

Theaters that risk violating “the show must go on” have a compelling reason, says David Ira Goldstein, artistic director of the Arizona Theatre Company -- which uses grad students from the University of Arizona to understudy most roles. “We’re more than a ‘show,’ in many ways,” Goldstein says. “We’re a community resource, and it’s important that the community resource go on and not break the bank by spending more money on understudies” than it can afford.

The audience plays a part

If understudies are indeed unnecessary, the main enablers are actors who are willing to go on sick and audiences that don’t rebel at the occasional cancellation or book-in-hand performance.

Subscribers typically are willing to tolerate “a couple of hiccups,” as Goldstein puts it. Instead of demanding refunds for a canceled show, managers say, audience members are usually amenable to returning on another night or, if that’s not possible, to a swap for tickets to another show. It’s a far different dynamic from the fully understudied commercial theater of Broadway and touring musicals, where refunds for missed shows could be massive.

It’s also conventional wisdom among regional producers that, far from finding script-in-hand performances unprofessional, audiences tend to get a special frisson from them: There’s an added rooting interest as they wonder whether the odd duck thrown on holding a stack of pages will pull it off.

“They get behind it, but then it becomes more a sporting event than a theatrical event,” says Mark Harelik, a veteran Los Angeles actor who has starred frequently at South Coast Repertory, the Mark Taper Forum and other regional theaters -- including the title role in “Cyrano de Bergerac,” last spring at SCR.

With a week left in the run, “Cyrano” turned into an ordeal for Harelik. He sprained one ankle during a performance, then the other in a rehearsal aimed at reconfiguring his fight scenes so that the gimpy ankle would be protected. He took one night off because he was in agony, forcing a cancellation, then finished the run “wrapped like a linebacker.” The actor says he wound up hurting for months afterward.

Harelik knew SCR would take a financial beating if the shows didn’t go on -- a full house can bring in up to about $20,000 a night, according to managing director Tomei. Missing that one performance, he says, “caused me a lot of psychic pain. I wanted to protect the show. But I resented being put in the position of having to perform injured.”

Harelik says he doesn’t want to criticize SCR for its no-understudies policy. “They couldn’t have done a show the size of ‘Cyrano’ if they had to have understudies. On the other hand, for a theater to do a massive, expensive production that hinges so much on one actor, it would behoove the theater to hedge their bets just a little bit.”

Another understudyless trouper-of-the-year award for 2004 could go to New York actress Tia Speros. Early in the run of “Guys and Dolls” at New Haven’s Long Wharf last fall, she contracted a sinus infection and severe laryngitis. She croaked her way through the role of Miss Adelaide for several performances while it cleared up, feeling “icky” that the audience wasn’t seeing her in good form. Then, with a week to go, her father died in Los Altos in the Bay Area. Assured by her family that it was OK to delay the funeral, she finished out the run.

“When I told [theater executives] I didn’t need to go, they were on their knees with gratitude,” Speros says. “I don’t know how they can live through that. Is it worth the anxiety for them?”

“Actors have gone on with pneumonia, 103-degree fever, the whole bit,” says Kurt Beattie, artistic director of Seattle’s ACT Theatre, which, like the two other regional companies in town, the Intiman Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre, does not hire understudies. “But it’s at an enormous cost, from artists whose compensation is precious little to begin with. It ought to be different.”

Actors’ Equity certainly thinks so, but the union repeatedly has failed to win an understudy requirement in its contract negotiations with the regional theaters. With the contract due to expire March 6, John Holly, Equity’s Western regional director, says the union’s understudy proposal is again on the table, but he doesn’t hold out much hope it will be accepted.

“If our actors get sick, we don’t want them to get sicker,” Holly says. He scoffs at book-in-hand substitutions that regional producers use as a fallback: “It’s unprofessional.”

Lynnda Ferguson was touched and proud, however, to go on with a script at South Coast Repertory for two performances of “Brooklyn Boy” on the day Dana Reeve raced from Costa Mesa to New York to be with her dying husband. Emergency replacements had twice done the same for Ferguson at SCR when she was sick or injured. Now, having memorized most of Reeve’s single scene in half a day, she felt happy to give back.

Still, Ferguson can see the flaws in the status quo.

“It’s really a screwed-up situation in some ways. Ideally, the union -- ‘Workers, unite!’ -- would say, ‘Let’s not go on. I won’t go on.’ But I got a few hundred bucks for that Sunday of ‘Brooklyn Boy,’ and I was grateful for it.”