20/12/2020: Jal Joshua Lebumfacil (usually Carbuckety, and cover Mistoffelees) made his debut as Alonzo!
When I saw Kade’s face in place for Carbuckety on the cast board last night I was worried about Jal: he’s only just returned a few days ago from an absence of over a month, after he injured his knee on the 13th or 14th of November.
(The cast board in Daegu, incidentally, has photos instead of the plain text that they had in Seoul: much better for the audience there, I’m sure, but much harder for those of us trying to squint at a low-res photo from the other side of the world. You have to have the alphabetical order of the characters and the cast headshots memorised!)
Nor was Jal in for Mistoffelees, because that’s Xavier there. But there he is, second in the top row, right after Thomas as Admetus - and we have Jalonzo!
Previously when Fletcher Dobinson has been off, Alonzo has been covered by Aaron Lynch (Coricopat) and Taylor Scanlan (George/swing), Thalia Burt, or Caitlin New have covered Coricopat. But this time Taylor was busy covering Mungojerrie, and Caitlin wasn’t in the swings booth; so it was either Thalia covering Coricopat and Aaron up to Alonzo, or just moving Jal to Alonzo, and this time he got his chance!
Carbuckety was played by Kade Hughes, which meant that Bill Bailey was absent; but this cast is quite used to that by now, and I assume that, as usual, Bill Bailey’s parts were split between Carbuckety, Electra, and Mungojerrie.
Given how boneless Jal’s Carbuckety is I would have loved to see his slinky Alonzo in person. He must surely come across as a very young, slender, aloof Alonzo - one regular audience member described him as “so sassy!” - and oh, can you imagine this willowy little protector getting all huffy at Tugger, or having to take on Thomas Inge’s Macavity?
He also comes across as an Alone-zo, especially by contrast to Fletcher Dobinson’s hyper-social Alonzo who flirts with everyone and is physically very demonstrative: he hardly engages with anybody before the curtain call or during the final dance-out, stays quite a way back from the audience, and leaves fairly quickly. Here’s a gifset of him dancing the finale just before the actual curtain calls.
Sources and breakdown of that castboard below the cut.
