"The Show Must Go On"

Bev Sykes has written a compendium of stories in the Davis Enterprise of local performers who have had to perform under the emotional duress of having recently lost loved ones, etc. It's really quite moving!:

Theater people - all performers - cope in the most horrendous of situations, because the show must go on. An audience has paid good money to be entertained, and the patrons don't care what's going on in your personal life.

...Director Ray Tatar recalls an actress who was doing a production of 'The Complete Works of William Shakespeare' at Sacramento's California Stage. Just before opening night, her 26-year-old brother died. The actress decided to do the performance anyway. She had the play's final lines: the 'all the world's a stage' piece that enumerates the seven stages of man.

'When she got to that speech, something came over her, and she just stared off into space,' Tatar said. 'The audience waited for a couple of minutes ... that's a long time, in a show that moves at a pretty steadfast clip. The theater was quiet. The audience was reading the reality of her expression.

'She finally just fired her way through it, to the end. The audience roared approval, as the other actors carried her off.'