The Understudies
The programmer's note
New this week and already the pilot people are messaging us about. Venkataraman stage managed for six years and it is all over this: the call times, the taped floor, the way a room goes quiet when the stage manager takes out a phone. Watch the accompanist, who has no lines and is the funniest thing in it. If you have ever been the second best person in a room and stayed anyway, this will land hard.
The film
The Hartwell Theatre has been running the same musical since 2017. Downstairs, in a rehearsal room with a taped floor and a piano missing an F, six understudies keep eleven roles ready. They are paid to be available. Most of them have gone on twice in three years. Every Thursday at eleven they run the show for a stage manager, an accompanist and nobody else. The pilot takes one Thursday and one piece of news: the lead is in negotiations, and if she goes, everyone below her moves up a rung. Venkataraman writes ensemble comedy in which every character wants something specific and says something else, and she stages the rehearsal room as a workplace, because that is what it is. There is a long and very funny sequence about a costume fitting for a costume nobody has worn. The last four minutes turn on a phone call, and the show this sets up is about people who are extremely good at a job they are asked not to do.
