SALT LAKE CITY — Actress Coleen Sexton, who plays the lead role of Donna Sheridan in Pioneer Theatre Company’s current production of “Mamma Mia!” was jamming out onstage to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” when the song’s declarations became more like questions.
As she jumped off an 18-inch high trunk during the May 14 performance (four shows into “Mamma Mia’s” 17-show run), Sexton came down on her foot wrong and, although she didn’t “break a leg” as the old theater adage goes, she did break a foot.
“You can dance? / You can jive? / Having the time of your life?”
Sexton, a seasoned performer who got her start on Broadway at age 19 as Lucy in “Jekyll & Hyde,” stumbled but managed to complete the song, but as soon as she was offstage, her pain level became apparent.
“Pretty soon thereafter, we knew that it wasn’t something very simple,” Mary Costello, PTC’s production stage manager, said in an interview.
What occurred in the ensuing hours after Sexton’s injury came thanks to the efforts of what associate director/choreographer Lenny Daniel called a top-notch cast and crew.
“This company has become such a family and everyone looks out for each other,” Daniel said. “(When Sexton was injured) it was never a question of (helping). It was just, ‘What do you need me to do?’”
Costello said an audience of about 900 people witnessed the injury and waited patiently as the cast and crew took an early intermission to assess the situation.
What do you do when your lead actress gets injured?
Some might logically think, “Put in the understudy,” but Sexton doesn’t have an understudy for “Mamma Mia!”
“Our runs are only two and a half weeks long, and in the case of an extremely demanding principal role — like this one — we sometimes can’t find someone able to fill the requirements of the role who we can also cast in the ensemble,” PTC’s artistic director Karen Azenberg wrote in a blog post about the incident.
Which left two options: end the show or make adjustments for Sexton to finish.
“(Sexton) kept saying, ‘I want to finish the show. How do I finish the show?’” Costello said.
“Coleen was just concerned about the audience and leaving them hanging on this show,” Daniel added.
The cast and crew immediately went into “survival mode” as Daniel called it, making adjustments on the fly to get Sexton on and offstage for the remainder of the night.
“How do we get her on there? We’ll put her to one side, get two shirtless guys so the audience has something to look at and we’ll have the two shirtless guys carry her out there and put her on the stage,” he said with a laugh. Once the show was over, Sexton was rushed to the emergency room and the wheels in Costello’s, Daniel’s and Azenberg’s heads started moving as they considered all the elements that needed to be adjusted to accommodate Sexton’s injury until the end of the show’s run on May 26.
The next day, they put ideas into motion.
First thing Tuesday morning, the three worked together to come up with modifications for staging and choreography, then Costello went on a mad-dash the rest of the day to meet with every other department and get everything else into place.
The costume department put zippers in the back of all Sexton’s costumes to fit her new medical boot and found new, non-heel shoe options so she could be stable on her crutches.
The musical director extended scene change music to give Sexton more time to exit the stage.
The follow spot operators adapted to Sexton’s new stage placements.
The lighting designer in New York City made adjustments to the lighting cues, which the master electrician implemented.
The wardrobe supervisor changed the location and procedure of some of the costume changes.
Members of stage management supervised backstage to make everything run safely and smoothly.
And, finally, Costello and Daniel met with the cast to walk them through all the modifications to the blocking and choreography.
“There were a lot of people to talk to on Tuesday,” Costello said with a laugh. “… It was a jam-packed day.”
“All the planning that went in, you don’t realize how much changes to make (Sexton’s) show as seamless and safe as possible and not hurt the integrity of the beautiful little show that we put together,” Daniel added.
In a matter of hours, the cast and crew made all the modifications to the show that had been months in the making. Costello said it was an extensive undertaking not only for Sexton but for the 25 other people onstage and the 45-50 crew members backstage.
“It’s a huge effort to do this show as it was staged originally every night. It’s dance heavy, it’s really vocally demanding, but then also to have this to work around, the cast is doing a really great job and I think the audiences recognize that something really special is happening,” she said.
Daniel agreed, emphasizing that audiences aren’t missing out on anything with the new staging. He said an announcement is made before each performance informing the audience of Sexton’s injury but other than that, the cast performs as if nothing is different.
“We worked so hard on this charming, warm story about a mother and a daughter and we didn’t want to lose that,” he said. “… Yes, it’s obvious (the injury) is there, but you don’t want to acknowledge it and make a joke of it.”
Costello said it’s an experience the cast and crew aren’t likely to forget any time soon, both because of its memorable nature and the wakeup call it provided.
“I think sometimes you get so caught up in your individual workings of theater that this has really reminded me that it’s a village,” she said. “… To be surrounded by this group of people with something like this happening has really reminded me of the hope of theater and why I do this job.”