I'm glad that I didn't seem obnoxious.
Yes, it really is a myth that stars did not miss performances in the old days. Stars missed, supporting players missed, it happened. It almost surely happens more nowadays, but there are still people who rarely if ever miss. I have seen here that there are people who refuse to admit that such things happened in the old days, but they did. And, really, I am among those who revere the stars of the past and I wish for that time travel machine, but actors have always been human and almost everyone has sometimes missed performances.
As I think I noted here a few months ago — or maybe I never got around to posting about this but just started a draft reply that I never posted — Andrews seems to have missed quite a lot of performances in London. Some performances in New York, and more in London.
And even in New York, in addition to missing occasional performances because of illness, Harrison took quite a lot of vacation time — a total of three months, several weeks of which were taken by him absenting himself from a series of successive weekends off, making Edward Mulhare his unofficial alternate for a time. This was not advertised in any way, although it was mentioned in a couple of papers (once it started happening but not in advance). |
