Ding Dong, a Witch Is Hurt, but She Takes Her Final Bow

She wasn’t in costume, she wasn’t in makeup, and she wasn’t even in character. But when Idina Menzel took the stage in a tracksuit yesterday afternoon at the Gershwin Theater, the standing ovation — some 1,800 strong and five minutes long — was like few you’ve ever seen: a screaming, squealing, flashbulb-popping explosion that was equal parts ecstatic hello and tearful goodbye.

The trigger for this outpouring of love was the entrance — and exit — of Ms. Menzel, the Tony Award-winning actress and departing star of “Wicked,” the Broadway blockbuster based on “The Wizard of Oz,” just 24 hours after she had fractured a rib in an onstage accident.

Ms. Menzel, who has played the musical’s good-hearted, green-faced hero, the “wicked” witch Elphaba, was supposed to have given her final performance yesterday after 16 months in the show, but was forced to cancel after she fell several feet through a trapdoor near the end of Saturday’s matinee, stunning the show’s cast and crew as well as a sellout crowd.

“I melted and melted,” Ms. Menzel said to the audience yesterday, smiling with her rib cage still bandaged.

Seconds after her fall, the show stopped, a curtain fell, and a plea for doctors was made over the theater’s public address system. Reports of the accident hit the Internet almost immediately, filling Broadway chat rooms with the types of breathless accounts normally saved for natural disasters or certain Stephen Sondheim revivals.

“Everything seemed normal until you saw Idina fall and a stagehand run onstage behind that curtain to help her,” wrote one audience member posting on the popular site All That Chat. “The music stopped and you could hear Idina crying out, while someone was saying “Blood, blood, is there blood?” and “Call 911, hurry up.”

Ms. Menzel’s understudy, Shoshana Bean, was rushed into costume and makeup and finished out the show after a 45-minute delay. Ms. Menzel, meanwhile, — still in her witch costume and green makeup — was rushed via ambulance to St. Vincent’s Midtown Hospital on West 51st Street, where she was treated and released about 10:30 p.m., even as her shaken cast members were finishing that evening’s performance.

None of which, however, was any solace for Ms. Menzel’s fans — including scores of young women — some of whom had traveled hundreds of miles or camped out all night in the hope of getting a ticket to see her final performance.

One of those was Hilary Leavitt, a high school student and aspiring actress from Brick, N.J., who had been camping out in front of the Gershwin since 8 p.m. Saturday with three friends.

“My mom was, like, ‘Call me every 10 minutes,”‘ Ms. Leavitt said. “There was a little parental apprehension on Mom’s part over me staying out all night in New York. I guess that comes with the mother job, but I had to be here. I wanted to say goodbye to Idina.”

That, however, didn’t look like it was going to happen. By Saturday night, Ms. Bean, the standby, had been told that she would perform yesterday, and fans soon started to wonder whether or not Ms. Menzel had fallen victim to the Curse of Elphaba. After all, she is not the first actress to be injured playing the role; Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West (then not called Elphaba) in the film version of “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) was badly burned while filming a scene in Munchkinland, according to the Internet Movie Database.

Nor is Ms. Menzel even the first actor to be felled by a trapdoor on Broadway this season. In September, Nathan Lane, the star of the musical “The Frogs,” at Lincoln Center, bruised his legs while descending through a trapdoor in the stage and missed a show. Two actors in “Fiddler on the Roof” were also recently injured in a trapdoor accident at the Minskoff Theater, as was an actor in a similar incident on the set of the now-closed “Dracula, the Musical” at the Belasco.

Bob Fennell, a spokesman for “Wicked,” which tells the story of the Wizard of Oz from the witches’ perspective, said yesterday that the accident on Saturday occurred when an elevator hidden under the trapdoor descended before Ms. Menzel stepped on it. “It’s a computerized cue and that for some reason was initiated early,” Mr. Fennell said.

Alan Eisenberg, the executive director of Actors Equity, the actors and stage managers union, said its representatives would meet today to investigate what went wrong and to determine whether it was a technical error or whether Ms. Menzel had simply taken a misstep.

None of which, of course, was on the minds of Ms. Menzel’s fans yesterday, many of whom said they first became entranced during her first Broadway show, the musical “Rent,” in the mid-1990’s. Considered a hard worker in an industry known for its divas, Ms. Menzel won a Tony Award for best actress last June but is leaving the show to shoot a film version of “Rent,” scheduled to begin next month.

While her reviews have been great, Ms. Menzel, who is white, had a scare in December after she received a series of racist threats concerning her marriage to Taye Diggs, an actor who is black. The authorities were notified, and Ms. Menzel began to travel with security guards.

Those same guards were manning the stage door yesterday when Ms. Menzel made her surprise entrance at the very end of the matinee. With her co-stars and cast mates tearing up, Ms. Menzel quietly entered stage left, without makeup and dressed in a red tracksuit with matching sneakers. A second later, the capacity crowd burst into a thunderous round of applause, as flashbulbs went off and teenagers’ squeals filled the theater.

“We love you, Idina!” shouted one patron from the balcony. “How do you feel?”

She didn’t answer, but looked a little sheepish. After several minutes of sustained cheers, Ms. Menzel took the hands of her co-star, Joey McIntyre, who delivered the line, “I thought you’d never get here,” which prompted even more screaming.

After singing a few notes in the finale — she seemed to still be in pain — Ms. Menzel rejoined the cast after the curtain call, where she was hailed by her director, Joe Mantello, and given another long ovation. Finally, she stepped forward.

“I love you all,” she said. “It’s been the best year of my life. Thank you.”

And with that, she exited again, upstage. And for good.