THE Broadway attendance police are on patrol, and this time we’re giving out detention to – Fanta sia.
Since summer, the occasional star of “The Color Purple” has missed nearly 50 performances, production sources say. Following a three-week vacation caused by the strike, she dropped last Friday’s performance, causing pandemonium in the lobby of the Broadway Theatre.
An 8-year-old girl sobbed uncontrollably when she heard Fantasia was not going to be in the show.
“It was very sad,” my lobby spy reports. “Her mother was trying to explain to her that Fantasia was sick, but the girl didn’t understand and just kept crying.”
A couple who had tickets that night asked the man at the box office how many performances Fantasia has missed.
“Fifty,” he sighed.
“Fifty!” exclaimed the woman, startling everybody on the refund line.
(Broadway’s rule of thumb: If the star’s out, you can either exchange your tickets for another day or get a refund.)
Fantasia’s absences have wreaked havoc at the box office. When she took over the role of Celie last April from Tony winner LaChanze – hardly LaPerfect Attendance herself (40 no-shows, thank you very much!) – “The Color Purple” began grossing more than $1 million a week.
Since the American Idol began dropping performances, producers have refunded tens of thousands of dollars worth of tickets.
Fantasia did show up for work the day the strike hit and sang for disappointed fans outside the theater. News of her impromptu concert reached Sardi’s, where a group of Shubert executives were lunching.
Said one, acidly: “There’s no show, and she’s out there singing. Now if we could get her to perform when there is a show, we’d be in business.”
Sources say Fantasia’s out a lot because she’s simply not up to the grueling Broadway schedule.
“I’m not making excuses for her,” a source says, “but she lives the role when she’s onstage, and it’s taken an emotional toll on her. She’s just not up to doing eight performances a week. Even LaChanze – with her cold-hearted performance – couldn’t take it.”
What’s sad is that many of Fantasia’s fans travel hours and hours on buses from as far away as Alabama to see the show. Last summer, I journeyed up from Washington, D.C., with a church group to see “The Color Purple.” They couldn’t wait to see Fantasia, and had she been out, I think the entire congregation would have burst into tears.
Fantasia is terrific in “The Color Purple,” and producers of several
musicals-in-progress would love to have her as their leading lady. But nobody’s going to use her if she can’t do eight performances a week.
In the meantime, for making that little girl cry, I’m sending Fantasia to Broadway jail.
FANTASIA might benefit from reading about a theater legend who never missed a performance: Ethel Merman.
Brian Kellow, editor of Opera News, offers many examples of The Merm’s ferocious work ethic in “Ethel Merman: A Life,” from Viking.
Having starred in “Gypsy” for a year on Broadway, Merman was devastated to learn that Rosalind Russell would star in the movie.
Merman was, Kellow writes, hardly in the right frame of mind to launch a yearlong national tour of the show, “but a commitment was a commitment, and she refused to back out.”
Merman thought she could get even with “those sons of bitches in Hollywood” by crisscrossing the country showing audiences how Mama Rose should be played. She also hoped her tour would damage the movie’s box-office prospects.
Merman died in 1984. Her ashes are kept by her friend Tony Cointreau, heir to the liquor fortune, in a closet in his Park Avenue apartment.
Tony says Ethel’s a regular reader of this column and thinks Fantasia should “Get to work, kid!”