VIDEO – NEW YORK STORIES –
April 23, 2024 – Sara Gettelfinger had steadily worked on the Broadway boards since her debut in 2000’s Seussical, appearing alongside stars including John Stamos, John Lithgow and Jeffrey Wright in hits like Nine, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and A Free Man of Color, respectively.
“I was not in a good place,” she recalled. “That year of that Addams Family tour was sort of the ‘after’ of going from being a partier to very regularly using drugs and alcohol. I hit the end of the road … not only [was] it not giving me those perceived superpowers of ‘I have all this energy, I’m thin, I can do anything,’ but I was crashing and burning big time.”
“When I say I crawled over the finish line of the tour, I’m not exaggerating,” she added. “My health was really deteriorating,” the actress shared. “I was in the worst physical shape — and when I say the worst mental shape that I’ve ever been in, just paranoia to where I wasn’t able to leave the house, I wasn’t able to just take care of basic things in terms of just being able to maintain an apartment. And I had a very dear friend in Brooklyn who had been in a program, and there was just one evening where I was very much in a panic attack and I just remember taking a car to her apartment and saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And she said, ‘Give me your phone, we’re going to call your parents. It’s time.’ And the next day, I flew home.”
Gettelfinger briefly returned to New York to star in the 2014 Off-Broadway rock musical, Atomic. But she “always felt unsettled” in her work, and knowing that she previously turned to substances while constantly “chasing validation” from outside sources, she decided to move back home to Kentucky.
