Ouch!

"Everybody's afraid of Evi," says a source, adding that the stage manager, after several angry calls, changed her name on his cellphone to "Do Not Answer."

"What are they afraid of?" Evi responds. "Having a competent person on this show is very disturbing to them, I guess."

You know, competent people generally don't have to point out how competent they are. And people generally aren't scared of them.

Was that a prop? Was it a time period thing?

I'm sorry, do men actually wear these?

We're definitely a test-bed. After the phenomenal success of "Hairspray!", the producers simply gushed over the "sophistication" of Seattle theatre audiences. Since then, a number of shows have done their out-of-town tryouts here: "The Wedding Singer", "Princeses", "Young Frankenstein" and "Lone Star" (one could, by stretching, include "Light In The Piazza" in that list as well).

Almost all of the shows that actually made it to Broadway from Seattle (the execrable "Princeses" thankfully was canned before doing so) were extensively re-worked based on audience feedback, and so we've developed what is probably a well-deserved reputation for having a rather discriminating, knowledgeable musical theatre audience here.