Standby to star: Meet the understudies and swings saving Broadway

The music man wowed the world recently when he took a moment to recognize a special music woman.

During the curtain call of “The Music Man” on Broadway, star Hugh Jackman brought Kathy Voytko, standby for his absent co-star Sutton Foster, to the front of the stage at the Winter Garden Theatre and sang her praises. Foster was out with a positive COVID-19 test result, and Voytko stepped in for the librarian lead at the very last minute.

“Kathy, when she turned up for work at 12 o’clock, could have played any of eight roles,” Jackman said at the preview performance. “And at 1 o’clock, she had her very first rehearsal as Marian Paroo.”

He added in a clip that exploded online: “The swings [who cover several ensemble roles, or ‘tracks’], the understudies, they are the bedrock of Broadway.”

That’s always been true of the grueling year-round stage business, but never more so than right now. This past month on Broadway, little slips of paper denoting cast replacements are falling out of Playbills like confetti in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. 

Understudies, standbys and emergency last-minute fill-ins are the glue keeping Broadway from falling apart during the Omicron surge — performances of “The Music Man” are paused through Wednesday after Jackman tested positive for COVID-19 last week — and with frequent testing required at Midtown plays and musicals.

Stories like Voytko’s are echoing around Shubert Alley every day. For instance, last Thursday at “The Lion King,” one of the actors who plays Young Simba stepped up to assume the role of Young Nala with a script in hand (although he didn’t need to use it).

Swings are tackling roles they never thought they would play, actors who departed shows years ago are being brought back into the fray and cast members from other stagings are being flown to New York at a moment’s notice.

Here are some of the hardworking actors keeping Broadway alive this winter.

Marika Aubrey — ‘Come From Away’

Marika Aubrey was unwrapping Christmas presents at home in New York when she got a call at 9:30 p.m.

It was from Danny Goldstein, the associate director of “Come From Away,” the musical in which the actress plays pilot Beverley Bass on tour. 

“He said, ‘Hey? Are you still in New York?,’ ” Aubrey, 40, told The Post. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m here till the day after tomorrow.’ ”

A pleased Goldstein replied: “We need a Bev.”

She arrived at the Schoenfeld Theatre on West 45th Street at 11 a.m. the next day, took a COVID test and met much of the ensemble she would be performing with that night for the first time. 

“They didn’t know I was coming,” she said. “They’d been sitting there doing the math figuring out how the show would go ahead because they knew they didn’t have a Bev. Then when I walked in, the dance captain went ‘Oh!’ ”

With so many absences, there was a lot of math to do. 

“We had four standbys that were in tracks that they never do; we had two people from prior companies who hadn’t done the show in years who’d just been rung up similar to me during their Christmas breaks with their kids,” she said. “It was a real mishmash of people who had never worked together before.”

With just hours to go, the wardrobe department dug out whatever costumes they could find. “This vest fits well enough!” she recalled someone saying. By 2 p.m., she made her Broadway debut.

“It felt exciting,” she said. “Like we were 16 and had to keep the curtain up.” 

Aubrey did seven shows in four days, before COVID postponed the production until Friday. Soon, she’ll be headed back on the road with the tour.

But, she adds, “It was a nice little Christmas present for me.”

Alex Weisman — ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’

Five days before Alex Weisman was set to have his last performance in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the stage epic that continues the story of J.K. Rowling’s books, Broadway shut down on March 12, 2020.

“I had done 800 performances of the two-part play from the first rehearsal of the original company [in 2018] right up till the shutdown,” Weisman, 34, told The Post. “I didn’t get to have my final bow.”

Then, on Dec. 17, Hogwarts rang again.

“I got a ‘What’s he up to?’ phone call,” the actor said. A chat with his agents led to him returning to the play as a swing for COVID-related absences 10 days later.

In November, “Cursed Child” returned in a revised, one-part version, so Weisman had to adapt.

On video chat with stage manager Rachel Sterner and movement captain Chelsey Arce, the actor was filled in on a flurry of new entrances and exits, cut scenes and new choreography.

“I learned that over FaceTime, and when I got to my [in-person] rehearsal, I just did it,” he said.

Last week, the actor did five performances in the ensemble over three days and is at the theater every show day as a standby.

“It was hell on my body,” he said. “It’s a real workout. And it took me until the third performance for my adrenaline and heart rate to catch up with my brain. I didn’t sleep for like five days.”

But, he adds, “as stressful as this is, there is a beautiful catharsis for my own journey to find its closure.”

Jeff Kready — ‘Company’

As Jeff Kready watched his wife Nikki Renée Daniels onstage as Jenny during opening night of the musical revival “Company,” he had no idea he’d be joining her a few weeks later.

“It was not on my radar at all,” Kready, 39, said. “I thought it was a magnificent production, but, of course, my wife was the best one.” 

A week and a half later, after a performance was canceled due to a non-COVID illness, the producers decided to beef up the cast. Kready was asked to be an understudy the next morning. 

“My first thought was, ‘No! I could never do this job!’ ” Kready said. “Covering 10 roles in a Sondheim show? That’s an absurd amount of work.”

But the opportunity to be back on Broadway after a year and a half and do a show with his wife for the first time since they met during 2006’s “Les Misérables” proved too tempting to resist.

He officially starts understudying next week, but is ready to be called to go on at any moment.

In the Sondheim musical with notoriously tricky harmonies and lyrics, Kready has been hard at work learning every male role, and he calls it “hands down, the most difficult job I’ve ever had.” While he is still absorbing his many parts, Daniels is rehearsing to play the lead, Bobbie, in case star Katrina Lenk and others are out.

Rehearsals have been nontraditional. Kready has practiced with the associate director from London on Zoom, and had big empty rooms entirely to himself when the creatives were sidelined.

“I’m seeing this as a challenge I want to meet,” he said, “when everybody is killing themselves to bring Broadway and the arts back.” 

Kready is excited. There’s one role he hopes to play more than any other though.

“David, who is my wife’s onstage husband,” he said. “I think that the first time we get to go on together and play opposite each other as husband and wife will be a very special moment.”