Hi! It was just shared in a Q&A on Shakira's stories that the West End Super Swing's priorities are:
Shakira: Aragon & Cleves
Meg: Boleyn & Parr
Laura: Seymour & Howard
If I understood correctly (hope I interpreted it right), they each have a cover order (1 to 5), with their two priorities being at the top.
What do you think the full order for each Swing is, and do you think their priorities being consistent with the Alts' 1st covers are so they can each effectively be a 1st cover for an Alt in case of vacation, etc.?
Thanks!
So, this was a very fun 24 hours for @lightleckrereins and I because we were literally trying to figure out their priority a week or two ago and came up with exactly these first covers. I do think it's lowkey hilarious that they just kind of have double alt system at this point with the three swalts w 2 first covers each (six, you wanna switch to my six alts system soooo bad). But yes, I think you understood correctly! A few other swalts have alluded to a similar system the last few years, with two main covers and then everything else in a clear order after that. For instance, near the end of the 2022-23 cast the alternates (not swings) all seemed to have switched to a this system. Danielle Rose explained her cover order at that point as Howard/Boleyn, Parr, Aragon, Seymour, Cleves. This is different than the original alternate cover system style of 2 1st covers, 2 2nd, and 2 3rd. It's really hard to know the exact order for each swing. Sofia and I have been trying to understand that for weeks (okay, who am I kidding, really it's been months). We've thrown all sorts of Excel functions and statistical analyses at my performance sheet haha. There are some things that we feel fairly confident on, but the possibility of any certainty is majorly complicated by virtue of vacations, Laura having to learn all the tracks for the first time (unlike Shakira/Meg), and a lot of uneven coverage with some roles having significantly more or less swing coverage dates. But that's where a bunch of math, logic, and some assumptions come in to fill the gaps, but again...no certainty. There are two things we feel most confident on:
First covers: Shakira A/C, Meg B/P, and Laura S/H Obviously, we know these because Shakira and Laura confirmed them yesterday!
Fifth covers Now, this is our first big assumption. Sofia and I feel fairly confident that Aragon is Meg's 5th cover, and that Cleves is Laura's 5th cover. But Shakira's is much harder to guess. We've made the case for a few different possibilities, but Sofia came up with the theory that we feel is most likely: that the swings' 5th covers correlate with the alternates' 3rd covers. So...Leonor covers Aragon, which is Meg's 5th cover; Odelia covers Cleves, which is Laura's 5th cover; and Honey covers Boleyn, which makes it Shakira's 5th cover. This was surprising to me because, at the start of the run, Shakira was A/B/C and Meg was S/H/P while they waited for Laura to debut. But it's apparent that a lot of coverage has moved around since (i.e., Laura now being 1st priority S/H) and Sofia is correct in her assertion that there being a correlation between alternate 3rd covers and swing 5th covers makes a lot of sense, especially with Meg A/Laura C already lining up. So...this is our working theory that helps fill in Shakira's. Now, here's where everything gets muuuuch more complicated. We're assuming that, for the sake of coverage, things loosely follow the old alternate system of 2 1st covers/2 2nd covers/2 3rd covers. That means that each role is included once across 1st covers, 2nd cover OR 3rd cover, and 4th cover OR 5th cover. Since we've assumed that the 5th covers are Boleyn/Aragon/Cleves, then Seymour/Howard/Parr need to be the 4th covers and each of the six tracks will happen exactly once across 2nd and 3rd covers. This is where we really got into all the nitty gritty in terms of every time a swing played something other than one of their first covers and the exact context of it - which other swings were on that performance, and exactly what roles were they playing? which swings were out of the show? which roles had Laura debuted by then? at this point Sofia and I both ran to our own respective spreadsheets to puzzle things out in the ways that made sense to our respective brains (mine of course included some hyper specific Excel functions, and Sofia's included what she refers to as "cover sudoku") From looking at: 1. Confirmed first covers; 2. Assumption of fifth covers (including the correlation with alts' covers); 3. Assumption that tracks happen only once across 1st covers, once across 2nd/3rd covers, and once across 4th/5th covers; and 4. Contextual information from shows where swings did not cover their 1st tracks... Sofia and I came up with two possibilities that we think are most likely:
(The only thing that really changes between the two is just that we swapped Seymour/Howard for Shakira and Meg)
Again, no idea if either of those are accurate and I'd be surprised if either are 100%!! there's just too many limitations on what we know, and to try and even get to a full guess we had to make the above assumptions to fill in those gaps. but I think both of these are pretty reasonable guesses based on what we do know! And now that I've taken wayyyy too long for that explanation...on your last question, I think it's up for debate! The best way to take a good guess at that would be to know exactly when this cover order was solidified, and since we don't know that it's hard to guess what exactly the considerations were. I'm inclined to think it wasn't solidified until a few weeks after opening, and it's also very possible that it's changed over time as Laura has debuted more tracks. It's just hard to know with any certainty! Re: vacation: If they were trying to make sure swings could adequately cover alts during vacation, I'd have expected they'd intentionally have different priority combos than the swings (ie, if Leonor is out and both Seymour and Howard coverage is needed, it would make more sense to have Laura as priority S and Meg as priority H than it does to have Laura as priority for both)
