| Hey, IvyLeagueDropout. I went to double check and found that I had overstated things. While it was not super-rare up through the 1960s and at least partway into the 1970s for playbills to list actor names rather than character names in the understudies list, it was also not especially common. Hal Prince particularly did it regularly up till sometime in the 1970s, but other producers did it less often. An estimate based on just a bit of searching over the last few days would be that perhaps around 5 to 10 percent of musicals did it back in the days when it was sometimes being done. But for shows that had standbys listed above the understudies list (or sometimes at the start of a list), the standbys would sometimes be listed as covering an actor rather than a character name, but then those roles for which understudies, as opposed to standbys, were listed would have the character names. |
