Guarding the Throats of Broadway

Breathless and behind schedule, Dr. Linda Dahl rushed into the waiting room of her office on East 56th Street in Manhattan where two patients, handsome men with chiseled physiques, waited.

“Someone once asked me, ‘What’s with your patients? They’re all gorgeous,'” she said later with a laugh.

Well, many of them are actors. Dahl, 47, is an eye, nose and throat doctor who looks after the vocal cords of many Broadway performers, to keep them in good singing shape.

This includes leads in current productions like “Wicked,” “Kinky Boots,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Hamilton,” “Aladdin,” and “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”

The two actors in her office last Monday were Roddy Kennedy, a “swing” fill-in for numerous roles in “Hamilton,” and Tyler Hardwick, who would be stepping onstage shortly in “Once on this Island.”

Hardwick said he wanted a checkup on his voice since the dust from the sandy set onstage sometimes irritated his throat.

“As performers, we can’t really get sick,” he said. “If a cold lasts a week, that’s not a luxury we can afford.”

Especially in some older theaters, dust, mold and other irritants can aggravate performers’ throats, trigger allergies, and cause sinus infections and vocal fatigue, Dahl said, not to mention the grueling schedule.

“It’s no joke to perform eight shows a week on Broadway,” said Dahl, who found Hardwick’s vocal cords in good shape. She took his arm, gave him a pre-performance shot of vitamin B-12 to strengthen his immune system, and sent him off to the theater.

Kennedy said he was preparing to do a stint in the role of Gen. Charles Lee this week in “Hamilton.”

“We perform in wool coats, so we need a lot of air conditioning, and that can dry out your throat,” he said.

Using a laryngoscope to examine Kennedy’s throat, Dahl saw that his vocal cords were inflamed. She gave him a shot of B-12, along with a steroid, an anti-inflammatory, and an immune booster.

“No drinking for a week,” she said.

During the Tony Awards season, the most strenuous time for many Broadway performers, Dahl is rarely without a backpack full of treatment supplies, to handle the emergency calls she inevitably receives from panicky performers. During her backstage visits, even many performers who are not her patients clamor for free vitamin B-12 shots before showtime.

“Everyone lines up,” she said. “It’s almost like a cattle call.”

Her personal record — “I gave 48 B-12 shots in a half-hour” — came before the opening curtain for “Frozen,” she said.

Dahl said she had a difficult childhood growing up in North Dakota, a child of Syrian immigrants. She put herself through college and medical school in the Midwest and then moved to New York City in 1998 for a surgical residency at a city-run hospital in the Bronx, she said.

Later, working at an Upper East Side medical practice, she began treating performers and amassing word-of-mouth referrals.

In the early 2000s she became an avid boxing fan and worked on the side as one of the first female fight doctors in New York state. For several years, she worked ringside stitching up battered boxers, an experience chronicled in a new memoir, “Tooth and Nail.”

But her Broadway fandom bloomed late. Even as her showbiz patient list grew, she remained uninterested in attending musicals and declined patients’ invitations to their shows.

“I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to watch jazz hands,'” she recalled.

But then in 2014, Broadway star Neil Patrick Harris, a longtime patient whose voice was taking a pounding in the grueling lead of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” gave her a friendly ultimatum: “If you’re going to take care of me, you have to see the show."

Dahl agreed, and was amazed at how physically demanding his role was.

“Only then did I realize how much I was missing out on,” she said. “Now I see almost everything on Broadway.”

In a phone interview, Harris said that Dahl watching him perform “helped inform her why my cords were looking the way they were, because ‘Hedwig’ was an intense punk rock show — it wasn’t “Oklahoma.”

Harris said Dahl’s calm, supportive manner is helpful for those times when “you’re worried you’re never going to sing again.”

“She has talked me off many a ledge,” he said, including early 2014, when he was sick with the flu during press previews for “Hedwig.”

A steroid shot saved the day, he said, and an emergency 11 p.m. treatment several months later helped him finish out the exhausting run of “Hedwig,” for which he won a Tony Award (and thanked Dahl during his acceptance speech).

David Cook, who currently holds a leading role in “Kinky Boots,” said Dahl shows up at the theater for emergency visits, to help him. And Jessica Vosk said that when she took over the lead role in “Wicked” last month, Dahl give her a shot of B-12 as “my opening night gift” and has repeated this weekly, usually in the dressing room.

Dahl said that, among her clients, the stage professionals are usually more desperate to get treated and more thankful afterward, than non-performer patients.

“My other patients get better, and that’s that,” she said. “But with my theater patients, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, you saved my career.'”