This understudy, of Broadway's '& Juliet,' knows the show must go on. Some days, she’s why it does.
Actor Rachel Webb was selling Nikes at a store on the Upper East Side, about a year ago when her agent called to say she’d gotten not one, but two roles in a new, hit musical from the West End, called “& Juliet.”
On Tuesday, “& Juliet” was nominated for nine Tony awards, including “Best Musical” and “Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical.”
But little of that glory goes to Webb directly. She’s an understudy, and despite putting in all the hours of a lead, she receives less of the adulation – and sometimes, she gets just the opposite.
Once, when the show was running in Toronto, the lead was too sick to finish the performance. Webb was backstage when the stage manager announced that she'd be taking over as Juliet mid-show. The audience groaned.
“We were just like, well, they hate me,” she said, recalling the moment in a spacious lounge at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in Midtown.
The tricky thing about being an understudy is that audiences have spent a lot of money, navigated the hordes of Times Square and crammed themselves into tiny seats — and they didn’t necessarily do that to see you.
