What I had not anticipated quite as thoroughly, though, was learning an even larger lesson of backstage life: a star does not come close to creating a performance on her own. From the stage managers to the prop men to the women who waited for Andrews in the shadows of the scenery with her next costume and a bottle of throat spray, the exertions of a small army of theater people, invisible to the paying customers out front, were making the imaginative universe of the show possible.