I've been try to remember the name a musical I watch about 16 years ago on AMC. It is based around the time of the civil war. The main actress and her family travel around putting on performances in Bar. They slowly become more popular and make it big. The actress has a love interest in the movie that she meets on the road. He goes to war, the last part of the movie she get a telegram that he has been killed. Thinking he's gone she goes on and performs one of her best performances ever. Of course after the performance and she is leaving the theater he shows up. Does anyone know this movie?

It has been ages since I saw this film, so long that I have only hazy memories. It's about a traveling theatrical troupe in that time period:

Heller in Pink Tights (1960)
IMDb review:
This is George Cukor's sole attempt at a western. As is typical of Cukor, instead of doing a Western like John Ford or Howard Hawks or Michael Curtiz as a look at men fighting men against pure nature backgrounds, we have Cukor looking at the coming of culture to the West, here in the acting troupe led by Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren, and how it is doomed to triumph over the individualist, here Steve Forrest as a desperado who ends up accepting his defeat.. . Here some of the most interesting things are the company rehearsing. In one scene, they are putting on Offenbach's "La Belle Hellene". What is most interesting is their guaranteed show stopper: "Mazeppa". This was a popular play in the middle 19th century, based on an incident of the wars between Peter the Great and Charles XIV of Sweden. Mazeppa of the Ukrainian Cossacks was captured by his enemies, tied naked to a wild horse, which was released into the forest. Mazeppa died as a result. The play was a big success for Adah Mencken, a poet and actress who was prominent in the 1860s on both sides of the Atlantic. To titilate the men in the audience, she wore flesh-color clothing so that it looked like she was naked. Sophia Loren puts on similar pink-colored tights~hence the film's title~and does the scene on a real horse and a moving stage.

Heller in Pink Tights (1960) - IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053902/)

I think "Mother Wore Tights" (1947), also about an acting troupe, is set too late in time to fit.

I'll try to think of other possibilities.