At Chau Chow, three circular tables were awkwardly pushed together. It was the cast’s first evening together since beginning Boston tryouts. On the wall behind, two fierce gold dragons faced each other on a field of red. And at one end of the tables, her foot propped up in a black ski boot on a neighboring chair, sat—who? Christina, of course. Did you think that she’d gone away? Applegate had been a shadowy presence in Boston—hanging out in the boys’ dressing room, popping into the audience. Later, she described her role in Boston as an off-court booster. “Kobe Bryant, people like that, they stay on the sidelines and cheer their team on,” she said, choosing a curious role model.

D’Amboise sidled up to Applegate, who rose for a lengthy hug. They whispered to each other for a long minute. Applegate greeted her guests and introduced herself to me. How’s the foot? “It’s great,” she chirped. “I’m swimming, I’m doing Pilates!” The group ordered vast amounts of food, and drank a vile-tasting cocktail called a Flaming Lamborghini. D’Amboise, sitting on a tennis ball—helps the hamstring—was taking it all pretty well. “Did that song just happen really fast?” she asked Janine LaManna, who’d taken over the week before as one of two Charity sidekicks.

And yet it was a little weird. Who was the star? Each made a toast: D’Amboise raised her ice water to “rolling with the punches,” and Applegate—clinking a glass with a chopstick and propping herself up on her boot—announced, “I just wanted to say how happy it is to see you all, and to say that I still want to live in a big apartment with all of you.”

The next morning, the reviews were dismissive of the show, though kind to D’Amboise. The Boston Globe summed up the prevailing sentiment: “Why Sweet Charity? Why now?” Later that night, the cast struggled to tighten the production. “The Rhythm of Life,” a funk number about a sixties cult, lacked religious fervor. The script was being tweaked. And crammed into the schedule was a photo shoot of D’Amboise. Shortly before seven, she posed on a set couch, twirling a cane and vamping in front of a Rothko-style painting flooded with blinding orange light. “Try to go back as far as you can without hurting yourself,” the photographer told her. D’Amboise stayed put. She snuck a dance step between shots. Mysteriously, half her photos were shot in stark silhouette. They were arty enough, but why shoot her if you couldn’t see her face?

That night’s performance was much tighter, and it was a more assured Charlotte d’Amboise who twirled her final twirl on the lamppost, reprising the opening line at the show’s close. “Did you ever have one of those days that was perfect? I have. This isn’t it. This definitely isn’t it. But . . . there’s always tomorrow.”

The next morning—the morning of D’Amboise’s splashy Times profile, headlined “For Her, The Show Goes On”—Weissler called his director. The show, he said, was not going on: Weissler was shutting it down. The advance, which never exceeded $2 million, had been dwindling since Applegate’s name had dropped off the marquee. In shock, Bobbie worked the cast for three more hours. “I didn’t want the rehearsals to stop, so I told no one,” he says. Eventually, he dropped the bomb. He and choreographer Wayne Cilento caught a plane back to New York, and spent the flight in silence.

And that was that. Until the following Tuesday, when Weissler made a startling pronouncement: The show would, indeed, go on. Again. But not with D’Amboise. Christina Applegate would appear as Charity when the show opened on May 4—two weeks late but just in time for the Tony-nomination deadline. What’s more, as if she hadn’t been tortured enough, Charlotte d’Amboise would soldier on in the first week of previews, from April 11 through 17, when Applegate could take over. The news went out before the cast was told: Co-star Denis O’Hare found out when his agent read the release on Broadway.com. Instead of going back to Chicago, D’Amboise returned to rehearse frantically, while Applegate took notes and continued physical therapy. It was still too early for her to take the stage.

After a photo shoot in Soho on a balmy Thursday (if you’ve got a new story to sell, sell it!), Applegate kept her driver waiting while she bummed a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” she noted dryly, as an assistant gave her a light. “Except when my life gets a little . . . interesting.”

She is not sharing an apartment with the entire cast. Weissler originally wanted to house her in an apartment at the Time Warner Center, but she asked for a downtown house with a yard big enough for her dog. On the ride uptown, Applegate shared a Polaroid of the chihuahua-dachshund mix dressed as a princess for Halloween. Then she worked on remembering how she got the show’s cancellation canceled. “I don’t think I even cried,” she said, “except on the second night, just by myself. Break your foot and two weeks later a show is closed! But I let it out and pulled up my bootstraps.”

The next day, in the theater lobby, the star’s recollection was clearer still. “You know, a lot of that I really can’t discuss,” she conceded, when asked if she did any of her own fund-raising. “I made phone calls, but my main call, the one that actually worked, was the one that I had with Barry. He had already made a lot of calls. And he and I had never really talked about why I was doing the show to begin with. I think that struck a chord in him.” Did she personally invest in the show? “No, I did not. But I personally invested my soul in the show.”

As we spoke, Applegate took off her boot and peeled away the Ace bandage, and I found myself looking at The Foot. On her ankle is a tattoo symbolizing Agape, or “unconditional love”—the name of a New Age church she and her mother attend in L.A. There is a large bunionlike bump that, while painless, will never heal. “There goes wearing my Jimmy Choo mules,” she joked. She attached an ultrasound machine that resembled a Game Boy with a Velcro belt. It’s intended to speed the healing of the bone, and she got it for free because “I had an angel come into my life”—namely, a medical rep who’d seen the show and was looking to promote the $3,000 device.