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The Perfect Blendship
Sutton Foster, Colin Donnell, and Joshua Henry on the beauty and friendship of Violet spring
By Harry Haun
The second coming of Violet, the 1997 Off-Broadway musical by Jeanine Tesori (music) and Brian Crawley (book and lyrics), amounts to a modest miracle, as far as man-made miracles go, and it couldn't happen to a nicer girl who believes in miracles. 
The title character—in short-story form, The Ugliest Pilgrim by Doris Betts—is a trusting young farm girl from Spruce Pine, N.C., who hops on a Greyhound to get to her miracle, which happens to be in Tulsa in the form of a faith-healing televangelist. 
What she had in mind was a face-healing. When she was 13, watching her father chop wood, the shim of his axe blade suddenly came loose and struck her across the face, leaving a ghastly gash that runs from her nose all the way down her left cheek. 
Sutton Foster is playing the part without benefit of makeup  of makeup or even a Phantom of the Opera mask—though a stage technique commonly known as Elephant Man-itis. That's when a disfigured character is presented as a beautiful young man in a loincloth and you say, "What scars?" Foster's scars are similarly invisible. 
And that's the whole point of the piece, contends the actress. "Everybody has scars. Some you can see and some you can't. Violet's was literally given to her by her father—accidentally by nevertheless."
Continued on page 37

Colin Donnell, Sutton Foster, and Joshua Henry
12
Photo by Jeremy Daniel

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