The Fall Musical

by Peter Lerangis

  “The who?”

  “DC? You know, Drama Club?” Brianna looked at Casey as if she were scolding a child for forgetting her alphabet. “Which you’re about to join?”

  “I am?” Casey asked.

  “Great! I knew you’d say yes!”

  And like that, she was around the next corner.

  Back in Westfield, when she was a sophomore, Casey knew a senior who liked to drive close behind trucks, claiming they created pockets of airspace that sucked you along. It was kind of dangerous, he admitted, but it felt great, like you were pulled into a magnetic field. That’s what it was like with Brianna. Walking with her in a crowded hallway was like flying on someone else’s power. The movement all around them changed—body language, eyes, crowd patterns, everything adjusted to Brianna. She was the only one traveling in a straight line—aside from Casey, who was only borrowing the pocket of airspace.

  Casey’s Westfield friends had been quiet and studious. The student government and yearbook types. They would have had plenty to say about someone like Brianna, none of it very nice. But Brianna turned expectations upside down.

  Brianna stopped in front of Room 147. “Here we are, the Lair of Liebowitz. You know about theater in this school?”

  Casey nodded. “The town rolls up on opening night,” she said. “Everyone shows up to the musicals. It’s like football teams in Texas. The costume and set budgets are six figures—”

  “You read about us in the New York Times.”

  “Sunday Arts and Leisure section—”

  “Good Lord, you are a total freak.” Brianna smiled, and the sun seemed to blast in through the windowless walls and ceiling. “Like it or not, girl, you are one of us. Have an up-tempo and a ballad prepared for next Tuesday. Ms. Gunderson will accompany, and she can play anything. For callbacks, we’ll have sides available. This is not—I repeat, not—the Big One. The stores will not shut early, or any of that crap. It’s our small fall musical, something new this year—Harrison’s idea. He worked on getting permission all summer long. You’ll like Harrison; he’s Greek, but don’t hold it against him. Actually, he’s pretty hot, if you like the dark, smoldering, serious type. He swears his eyes are brown, but look closely, they’re black. Anyway, the show is Godspell. Great music. As you know, it’s about Jesus, but you don’t have to be Christian. Stephen Schwartz wrote it, and he’s Jewish. Actually, so was Jesus. You can sing from the show if you want.”

  “Sides?” Casey said.

  “Sections of the script you can read. Scenes. One of the other Drama Club members will read the other characters.”

  “Okay,” Casey said, already numb from trying to remember the details.

  “I’m the student director, which means I won’t be playing a role. Mr. Levin—he’s our faculty adviser—is the actual director, but only because the administration says kids can’t direct. Which means I’ll mostly be in charge.” Brianna looked at her watch. “Gotta go. Hey, do you know Alex Duboff? From Westfield?”

  Clang. The sound of the name smacked Casey right back into reality.

  “No,” she replied. Which was true. Alex had been a classmate, but she didn’t know him, just knew of him. And she did not feel like expanding this conversation. Looking backward was not in the plan. Who’d have thought Brianna would know Alex Duboff?

  “Oh well, just wondering.” Brianna shrugged. “Someone I met at the beach over the summer.”

  “How did you know I lived in Westfield?” Casey asked.

  “Uh, because you told me?” Brianna gave her a grave look. “Already the nearness to Liebowitz is corrupting your memory. See you after school.”

  As she turned to head down the hallway, the bell rang. Immediately kids scrambled toward classes, screaming and giggling. But Brianna did not vary her pace one bit.

  “Please have a . . . a . . . seat,” came a thick, ragged voice behind her.

  Mr. Liebowitz was a craggy old man with a robust salt-and-pepper toupee and a plaid shirt so often washed that you couldn’t tell the colors. He smiled warmly at Casey, looking through crooked glasses, then leaned over his attendance sheet. “And you, my dear? You are . . . ?”

  Casey quickly rushed over to his desk. “Casey. Casey Chang. There’s a mistake on the attendance sheets. May I?”

  Before Mr. Liebowitz could answer, Casey took a pen from the desk, crossed out the name “Kara,” and wrote in her new name, an action she would repeat eight more times that day.

  2

  From:

  To:

  Subject: u wanna change ur last name to sterling???

  September 4, 11:07 P.M.

  hey, rachel,

  y r u never online? dont people im at yale?

  ok, about changing ur name. uh, no. rachel KOLODZNY will forever be known as the greatest stage manager of all time at rhs and we are ALL expecting to see that name on bway, so the answer is NO!! get some yalie genius to clone you, call THAT one rachel sterling, and send her back to the drama club cuz we STILL don’t have a stage manager (legendary SM shoes are hard to fill!). god we miss you. i miss you. ☹

  the fall musical is gonna be godspell. harrison’s choice. no, im not gonna be the star of this one. i followed yr recommendation & told mr levin I want to be studnt director. i didn’t tell him “cause rachel sez it will look good on my transcript to yale” but i believe it. and besides i am a natural at bossing people around ☺ oh god I will miss acting, tho . . .

  oh. there’s a new girl in town, casey. sweet and fun. nearly peed when she saw kyle. loves bway shows & knows them all—hosanna and halleluya (sp?)!!! she’d be perfect for the peggy role. description in the cast list: “the shy one. sometimes a little slow to get things, but when she does, she commits all the way.” she’s perfect for harrison too, but mr. perfect measures both IQs and waistlines with his eyes and in this case both of them are too high for his taste so he will once again miss out on a golden opportunity, but after trying to knock sense into that greek head since we were five years old, i give up.

  vre harrison . . .

  i love that word—“vre.” it’s greek for “you asshole,” but in a nice way. that’s what harrison sez. when his mom & dad say “vre” before your name it means they’re annoyed. if you say it right, rrrrolling the r, it’s like a slap. an entire culture of people who use asshole as a term of endearment, leave it to the greeks.

  i got mad at colter tonight for letting his hamster loose & called him vre colter. he punched me and i have an unsightly bruise. thinking of suing.

  but i digress. i hope casey can act. she says she’s done straight plays but you should have seen her lie about knowing this kid from her hometown, alex duboff. bad faking. well, i don’t blame her for lying. no one in her right mind would admit knowing that creep.

  luv and xoxoxoxox,

  bri

  “Um, when you say we have three minutes—does that mean per song or per audition?” asked Lynnette Freeman, whose hair had been cut, streaked, and shaped into something that resembled a sleeping raccoon. Not exactly the style of the musical Godspell, but interesting.

  “Per audition,” Harrison replied for what seemed the hundredth time, holding a sign-up sheet toward her. “We will probably only be hearing one of the songs you prepared—but if we need to hear the other, we will ask you. Fill in a slot and give your music to Ms. Gunderson. She’ll be playing piano.”

  Lynnette leaned over to sign the sheet. Behind her was a long line, freshmen to seniors, forty-three by Harrison’s count, all waiting to try out for ten roles. Everyone was dressed-up, made-up, buffed-up, hair-styled, nails-colored for the occasion.

  Harrison glanced over their heads, looking for Brianna. By now, Brianna should be here. This was not like her. Brianna was usually the first one. She was supposed to have brought the instruction sheets, along with a student helper for sign-up. As the Drama Club vice president, and assistant director of the show, she should have been there.r />
  As the club president, Harrison was pissed.

  “That’s whack, yo,” muttered a heavyset guy with a swooping emo haircut. “What if you do want to hear two songs? How can we sing a ballad and an up-tempo in three minutes?”

  “We’ll cut you off,” Harrison said. “And you don’t have to start at the beginning of the song. Just pick the best eight to sixteen bars, show them to Ms. Gunderson, and go from there.”

  “Bars?” asked Rose Wentworth, a sophomore, peeking over his shoulder.

  “Ms. Gunderson goes to bars?” someone else asked. There’s always a comedian.

  “Bars,” Harrison repeated. “Measures. The music between the vertical lines on the page of sheet music.”

  “We’re supposed to have sheet music?”

  It was relentless. And it happened every time. You’d think that at a school like Ridgeport, where half these kids could probably be comfortable on a professional stage, they would know this stuff. Instead of needing to whine, whine, whine:

  “No one ever told us that!”

  “Can’t we just, like, sing?”

  “Can we rap?”

  “There’s no rap in Godspell, dork! Wait. Is there?”

  “Do we have to listen to each other’s auditions?”

  “I have to be out of here by four-fifteen for a cello lesson!”

  One . . . two . . . three . . . Harrison counted to calm himself down. “No rapping. You won’t listen to each other—you wait in the hall. And no problem, you can sing a cappella.” Noticing a few blank responses, he added, “That means without sheet music, without accompaniment. All by yourself.”

  He felt a firm pinch on his butt, and then Reese draped her arms around him from behind. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re hot when you’re angry?” she whispered.

  “I’m. Not. Angry.” Which was true. He was not angry at that moment. He was other things, like frustrated. And . . . something else. Something that always came over him when Reese pulled stuff like this in public. Because Reese, in fact, was hot, especially when she put her hands on his chest from behind and breathed in his ear, forcing Harrison out of fear of embarrassment to discreetly place the sign-up clipboard in front of his pants.

  “Could have fooled me,” she whispered, her breath sweet-scented and warm. He cringed as she ran her fingers through his hair, which was way too thick and never returned to its shape if you messed it up and probably now looked like a brown haystack. “You know, these are normal questions, Harrison. Not everyone is a genius like you. Now calm those fiery black eyes and be cool. You never know where it may lead.”

  She gave his butt a quick pat (to a chorus of dorky “Oooooh”s from the crowd), then slunk up the aisle to an empty spot in the carpeted row between the orchestra and mezzanine seats. There, as if nothing had just happened, she began to stretch.

  “They’re not black, they’re brown,” Harrison muttered, matting his hair back into shape and trying not to look like an idiot. He did not let himself look at her. Looking at Reese meant trying to figure out what she wanted, and that was too confusing. They had hooked up once during sophomore year. Tame tongues-and-braces stuff at a party. Didn’t talk about it the rest of the year. But Reese had lost the braces and gained oh-so-much-more, and she seemed to want to make up for lost time.

  For show, for real—with Reese these days, who knew? And who had time to think about it when the auditorium was in chaos—dancing and singing in the aisles, push-ups and jumping jacks, loud conversations. Darci, her face twisted into either ecstasy or pain, was yodeling (or something) into a distant corner, right next to Ethan Smith and Corbin Smythe from the a cappella group, who were singing a duet, while Lori the opera singer kept repeating “Bbbbbrrrrrrreeeeee!” in a high-pitched voice, sounding like a sparrow on speed.

  Taming the masses was Brianna’s job. She was good at it.

  Beep. A voice message on his cell phone. Harrison quickly glanced at the screen, which showed the familiar cell number of his dad. Gus Michaels, otherwise known as Kostas Michalakis—patriarch of the Michaels family; renowned proprietor of Kostas Korner: A Gathering Place for Fine Dining at Cheap Prices—who probably wanted Harrison to come and work after school, which meant he’d conveniently forgotten about these auditions despite the fact that Harrison had reminded him at least twenty times. Which made Harrison wonder yet again when his dad was going to realize that there was actually life beyond the diner.

  But later for that. He flipped the phone shut.

  “Where is the diva?” asked Charles Scopetta, the Drama Club’s production designer. Charles had emerged from backstage, cradling a huge papier-mâché sun that covered all but his red Converse sneakers and his eyes, which were peeking out from under an obedient swoop of brown hair that somehow never managed to fall into his eyes. “I need her opinion.”

  “It looks great,” Harrison said.

  Charles put the sun down in the aisle and straightened up, ever-so-subtly sucking in his gut to hide what he fondly called the “Final Five,” as in pounds-to-lose. “Thank you, but La Glaser has final approval. Not that I don’t trust your exquisite taste.”

  “She’s not here yet,” Harrison said.

  “Oh, I knew it! I knew it. Freaking out in the bathroom because she cannot be the star.”

  “She’s the student director. She’ll have power.”

  “Yes, well, she does enjoy that—”

  With a sudden thump from above, the entire auditorium fell into pitch-blackness. Every conversation, every song, stopped.

  “Oops,” came a voice from the projection booth. “There seems to be a console problem. Uh, pay no attention to the man in the booth . . . heh-heh . . . ”

  “Dashiell, damn it, would you please turn on the house lights!” Harrison yelled.

  “Temper, temper,” Charles said.

  “Harrison?” Dashiell shouted as the lights went back on. “Can I show you the source of the problem? It appears that we have kind of an interesting dilemma . . . ”

  “Whatever!” Harrison called back. “Come down, please, we need to start!”

  “It’s rather massive,” Dashiell said. “But I’ll locate the plug. Wait . . . ”

  “What planet is he on?” Charles murmured.

  “At least he’s here,” Harrison said. “Where’s Brianna? She was supposed get someone to do sign-up—I shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “I know,” Charles replied, “you’re supposed to be running the launch meeting.”

  Launch meetings were a Ridgeport tradition- brief, intense, closed-door—where the Drama Club officers recited a Pledge of Conduct before the first audition of every show. It was all about treating auditioners with positive feedback and courtesy. Corny, but it helped. Harrison knew how wound up and emotional these kids felt. He’d been there. In Ridgeport, you started training early—for voice, tap, jazz, ballet, step dancing—and each teacher had a waiting list. (So did the town’s shrinks, who did a big business after each round of rejections.) A role meant you were somebody. Your picture, clipped from the newspaper, appeared in the window of every storefront. A total nobody could suddenly move onto the A-list.

  “Can one of your people help with the sign-up?” Harrison asked. “I’ll get Dashiell and Reese—”

  “I’ll get Mr. Levin away from Ms. Gunderson,” Charles said. “He can help. That’s why they pay him the big bucks.”

  Clutching his papier-mâché sun, Charles jogged down the aisle toward the stage. There, looking as if he were pinned between the Steinway grand piano and the stage, was the faculty adviser, Mr. Greg Levin. The sides of his beard were lifted by a pained smile. Leaning across the piano toward him, her left leg lifted up behind her so her penny loafer dangled from her bare foot, was the French teacher, Ms. Gunderson. She was pert, blond, and had a kind of preppy agelessness. She was also the accompanist for every musical audition—at least every audition since Mr. Levin had become faculty adviser.

  “Invite me to the wedding, kids!” Cha
rles called out. “But before that, we have a show to cast?”

  “Oh—yes, sorry,” Mr. Levin said, his face turning red as he quickly strode up the aisle and put on his plummiest Shakespeare accent: “Once more into the breach!” Mr. Levin was a former actor with an awesome résumé. On Broadway he’d played a man who died a quick, tragic death, in a show that unfortunately did the same thing. He’d starred in an Off-Broadway musical about a talking SUV and had carried a spear dashingly in a Central Park production of Richard III with Kevin Kline. He was sharp, funny, smart, could play comedy and drama, and was the greatest living theater FAQ source Harrison ever knew. Whether or not he had a weakness for Ms. Gunderson was hard to tell.

  “Are we all here?” he asked Charles.

  “The Duchess Brianna will be delayed tonight,” Charles replied.

  “Oh?” Mr. Levin said. “Is it the SAT prep course, the Intel scholarship meeting, yearbook committee, or Honor Society?”

  “Overachievers Anonymous,” Charles said.

  Mr. Levin smiled. “Ah well, I expect she will appear in the fullness of time.” Reaching the back of the auditorium, he took Harrison’s clipboard and switched to his booming Voice of the Director: “FRIENDS, ROMANS, AND THESPIANS, AFTER SIGNING UP FOR YOUR SLOT, YOU WILL PROCEED INTO THE HALLWAY AND MAKE YOURSELVES AS COMFORTABLE AS THE CIRCUMSTANCES ALLOW. I WILL CALL YOUR NUMBER AND THE NUMBER OF THE PERSON AFTER YOU, WHO WILL BE ‘ON DECK,’ AS IT WERE. . . . ”

  Harrison stepped into the aisle, took Reese by the arm, and called to Dashiell in the booth. “Dashiell. Launch meeting. Backstage. Now.”

  “Take me away, take me far, far away, out of here . . . ” Reese purred.

  Harrison paused. “West Side Story?”

  “Very good. Two points. Three gets you the door prize.”

  Harrison didn’t even want to ask. With Reese trailing him, he ran down the aisle, mounted the steps at stage left, and ran backstage.

  He didn’t get very far. The wing space at backstage left, normally a bleak, charmless place with cement floors and dust-darkened banks of pulleys, was now a landscape of taffeta poofs, lumpy woolens, old lamps and telephones, rickety tables, hollowed-out bookcases, two-dimensional cars, and fur coats. A group of quiet underclassmen was sifting through the piles, examining material, ripping a seam here and there, bringing more stuff from a room in a distant hallway.