The unnoticed heroes of Mamma Mia!

You’ll never see their names above the title, or in lights on the marquee. But without performers like Kyli Rae and Christopher Hudson Myers, Mamma Mia! wouldn’t go on.

Rae and Myers are two of the touring show’s four swings. They go on when an ensemble member is sick, injured, on vacation or taking a personal day. This can happen once a week, eight times a week or even in the middle of a show. It can get really complicated. And it has its own vocabulary.

“Standbys” are there to cover one specific role, usually the lead. In the case of Mamma Mia!, a character like Donna Sheridan, owner of the Greek taverna and mother of Sophie.

“Understudies” back up several roles, usually principals who have lines, scenes, songs and dances.

“Swings” go on in ensemble “tracks,” the path that any given ensemble member takes throughout the course of a show. Rae, who is also Mamma Mia!’s dance captain, covers seven female tracks; Myers covers eight male tracks. “Covering” means going on for another performer, knowing exactly what that actor does throughout the show and being able to carry it off as seamlessly as possible. It means knowing how to move onstage so you don’t bump into people, where you’re positioned in a dance number and what vocal part you must sing. Sometimes swings know months in advance that they’ll be going on, sometimes it’s mid-show, so they are always at the theater during a performance.

Like I said, it can get complicated.

Myers relates this story: He was in one night for an actor covering one of the dad roles. Then, toward the end of Act 1, the actor playing Pepper pulled a back muscle and couldn’t continue. At intermission, Myers switched to the “Pepper track.” The other male swing, who was already covering one ensemble track, had to pick up a second track as well.

The goal: To keep the show as intact as possible. If the audience notices you, you’re not doing your job, says Rae.

“There are definitely nights where, in the middle of a number, your brain goes up in smoke and for half a second, you don’t know where you’re going,” Myers says, with a good-natured laugh. “Audiences rarely notice, even though you’ve had a split second of panic. It’s really challenging, but it’s also what I like about being a swing.”

Both Rae and Myers have been with Mamma Mia! for about a year and admit that most theatergoers don’t know what a swing does or that the job even exists. Each has their own method to the madness, and each came to Mamma Mia in a different way.

Rae, who’s from Los Angeles, began dancing at age 6 and doing TV commercials by age 8. She went to high school with Broadway regular and “Glee” actor Matthew Morrison. She has danced with the Joffrey Ballet and played Marty in the 1999 international tour of Grease. She auditioned for Broadway’s Mamma Mia! years ago and always got a callback but never a job. Until now. She calls that “ironic.”

Myers, who’s from Fort Worth, Texas, got his swing feet wet at Hersheypark, the  theme park in Hershey, Penn., but he’d been doing theater since age 7, including a stint as the littlest Lost Boy in a Cathy Rigby Peter Pan.

“I pretty much fell in love with theater and wanted to do it the rest of my life,” he says unabashedly. He met his wife-to-be, Rachel MacIsaac, at Hersheypark. They spent three years entertaining on Holland American cruise ships, and then moved to New York. She, incidentally, joins the Mamma Mia! tour with this stop in Atlanta as — what else? — a female swing.

Yes, Myers admits, the entire family is crazy.

He does his job by keeping his tracks compartmentalized and taking good notes on a computer that is his ever-present backstage companion. Rae has a “bible” in which everything that’s staged for the show is charted on paper. She has a sheet for each of the seven tracks she covers. Each track has a specific traffic pattern and as many details as possible to help her get where she must be onstage without running into anybody. When not in a particular show, she often sits backstage with her head in this “bible” or watches the track of someone she hasn’t gone in for in a while.

Both admit it’s challenging.

A good swing, Myers says, has to be able to pay attention to details. “And you have to be able to learn at a very quick rate. And then you have to remember stuff and categorize it. You have to have a pretty organized brain and then be a chameleon.”

To that Rae would add the ability to recover quickly, and with grace. “As a swing  you will fail sometimes,” she says. “You will mess up, you will have epic failures.”

It’s all part of the gig.

“It is a hard job,” Myers says, a grin in his voice, “but it’s really, really fun.”

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Kathy Janich is an Atlanta theater artist, freelance writer and daily newspaper refugee. She is resources manager at Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre. Visit synchrotheatre.com.