On with the show: What happened when MTW’s lead actress broke her wrist on stage?

Break a leg, they often say in theater.

The phrase is meant to wish luck to an actor or actress before showtime.

It’s not supposed to be taken literally.

But it was a bit of a freaky Saturday for Kim Huber, who played one of the leads in Music Theatre Wichita’s “Freaky Friday” over the weekend.

Huber, who played the mother in the show opposite Chelsey Lynn Alfredo, backed up, lost her balance and tripped at the end of an Act I scene, landing on her right wrist.

As other scenes continued on stage, backstage managers wrapped her wrist and applied an ice pack.

MTW’s producing artistic director Wayne Bryan said he “raced backstage to see if she was OK and if we needed to stop the show.”

The theater had no understudies prepared to go on for her, because “there really was no one else in the company that would have been appropriate for that role,” he said.

Bryan said Huber told him: “It’s not my voice, it’s not my legs. I can do this!”

“She performed beautifully through the rest of the show without so much as a Tylenol and then took a trip to the ER, where they confirmed that the wrist is broken,” Bryan said.

After the trip to the ER, she ate a quick meal and returned to Century II for the evening performance of “Freaky Friday” – with her right arm stiffly bandaged.

In between shows, MTW’s costume designers worked to alter or redesign outfits “to accommodate the wrapping done at the ER,” Bryan said.

Some elements of the show were altered – fist bumps were switched to her left hand, and certain props had to be able to be used with only one hand, Bryan said. MTW’s stage managers Tiffany Orr and Amanda Bowman coordinated the changes with the rest of the cast in time for the show that night.

Huber refused to take any pain medications for her wrist “because she didn’t want to lose any mental agility,” Bryan said.

“People kept asking her (if it hurt), and she’d say, ‘It’s about a 4,’” he said. “Thank goodness she’s hardy and almost indestructible.”

Huber, who has performed with MTW 13 times over the years, finished the final three shows in a splint.

“MTWichita is often praised for creating Broadway-quality shows, but many of us thought this went just a bit beyond Broadway,” Bryan said. “We had to imagine an actor continuing to perform in spite of a broken bone, and the whole team proved their abilities to make changes at lightning speed.”

On Sunday, Huber posted to Facebook, thanking the theater for its help those final few performances, “as if I couldn’t love MTWichita enough.”

“It is so easy to keep my joy intact with all the love this place generates,” she wrote. “I’ve been so proud to share the show with the enormously talented and dear Chelsey Lynn Alfredo. We’ve had way too much fun! I’m going to miss this show, these people, and this place so much.”

This story was originally published July 16, 2018 at 12:10 PM.