A few days later and now we’re in the throes of our second full week’s work: dress rehearsals night after night, leading right up to the first preview, next week. Which, because I’m the only cast member who’s never actually performed the show in front of a live audience, kind of feels like my own personal and deeply terrifying opening night.
The Shubert Theatre, where we’re playing is stunning by the way, an old Victorian playhouse on West Forty-Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, just a handy, ten-minute walk from the apartment building. It’s been recently renovated to the nth degree and has amazing backstage facilities as well, like ensuite bathrooms off each dressing room…pure unadulterated luxury. And when I think of some of the dumps that Liz and I played when we were both young and struggling and desperately trying to get our Equity Cards I’m reminded of just how far we’ve both come. Because believe me, compared with them, this is sheer bloody Heaven.
It’s not only the plushest theatre I’ve ever played in my life, it’s also by a mile the largest. My stomach still does flip-flops every time I walk out onto the stage in front of the empty auditorium, feeling like Alice in Wonderland, shrunk small with everything around me magnified. Christ Alive, I can only imagine what it’ll be like to have two thousand pairs of eyes looking back at me, assessing me, weighing me up, wondering if I’m good enough to even be here in the first place. In fact, just the thought of it makes me wonder if I’ve even got room for another ulcer.
We didn’t see all that much of Jack last week, he was too absorbed with getting the technical end of the show honed down to perfection. Plus he’s not staying in the apartment block with the rest of us; he’s…get this…staying alone in his friend’s apartment at The Plaza hotel.
‘Who’s the friend, I’d love to know,’ Chris mused dryly when she heard this. ‘Donald Trump, perhaps?’
But from here on in, right up till opening night, we’re all his and boy is he working us like dray horses. To a high achieving perfectionist like Jack, his natural default setting is ‘genius’, and it’s like nothing is going to come between him and a five-star review in the New York Times, a standing ovation on opening night and a Tony award nomination for best director. Not if it kills him and all around him in the process. There’s a lot of talk about Tony awards being bandied around these days; mind you, most of the talk is coming from Jack himself, but still.
He’s a man possessed, his eye is on the golden prize and he’s got that tunnel vision that you only really see in people of greatness. Every single day this week he calls us to the theatre in the early afternoon, then painstakingly rehearses the show in the most minute detail over and over again, driving us on and on, well into the night, till every nerve ending in my body feels stretched to breaking point, like taut elastic bands.
Jack can be terrifying and these days I’m seeing a merciless side to him that I’d heard about but never actually witnessed before this. For instance, the hair and make-up assistant did something different to Blythe’s hair the other night before a dress rehearsal and when he came backstage for a note session afterwards, he raised one of his satanic eyebrows and cuttingly asked who exactly had done her hair? The council? Lucky it was Blythe he said it to, as she’s well able to stand up to him and regularly puts him in his place, like an adoring Mammy ticking off a favourite son. Had it been shy little Alex, I think the poor kid would have burst into tears.
Then he turned on Chris about a particular scene she’s in, which he’s forever harping on that he’s never been fully happy with.
‘I am trying my best in that scene, I’ll have you know,’ she snapped back at him, standing tall and thin, swishing her Indian-straight black hair imperiously over her shoulders and matching his satanic glare with a ferocious look of her own. You should have seen the pair of them squaring up to each other, like an episode of Jeremy Kyle waiting to be Sky-plussed.
‘Yes, I’m well aware that you’re doing your best,’ was Jack’s cool answer. ‘Which is why I know you won’t get any better. For fuck’s sake, Chris, I’ve seen toll booth attendants show more emotion at the shrugged acceptance of a two Euro coin.’
‘And what makes you think you have the right to speak to me like that?’ she demanded, steam practically coming out her ears.
‘Habit.’
‘What is it about cruel men who have power that makes them weirdly attractive?’ Liz asked me later on when the two of us were back in the privacy of our shared dressing room. ‘And the mental thing is, I don’t even particularly like Jack. Half the time he’s a pain in the arse. In fact scratch that; if I just isolate the pain to just my arse, I’d be delighted. But he’s just got that thing going on, you know, where men want to be him and women want to change him.’
‘Biggest mistake any woman could ever make,’ I said firmly into the dressing room mirror, lasing make-up remover onto my face to take off the heavy stage make-up, which is not unlike Polybond. ‘It’s impossible to change any man. Cruel men stay cruel and the women who stay with them end up having a shit life.’
‘That’s rich, coming from you,’ she snorted. ‘You’re married to the nicest man on earth. What in the name of God, pray tell, would you know about men treating women badly?’
I let it pass.
Anyway, our routine now pretty much revolves round living in the theatre, or else crashing out back at the apartment, surviving the nightly dress rehearsals and counting down the days till first preview. No time for anything else, not right now. In fact the short walk to and from work is the only bit of fresh air and exercise any of us are getting these days and the only one of us who hasn’t actually tested this out is Liz. Not in her shoes, not on your life
All of us, again barring Liz, have temporarily put the brakes on our social lives, at least till the show has opened, and we’ve got some measure of our lives back again. But in spite of the intensity of all this hard slog, somehow I’m still dancing round the place like Annie in Wonderland, loving being here, and still unable to get my head around the fact that I’m really, actually about to open on a Broadway stage!
I’ve already met the senior producer, one Harvey Shapiro, who tends to wear white suits a lot, has matching white hair and a white goatee beard and who looks exactly like Colonel Sanders on the side of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
‘What else does Harvey produce?’ I innocently asked Liz one night.
‘Everything. You name it. Films, treaties, rabbits out of hats. The whole works. Even just his name being attached to this means we’re already big news.’
Bless him, he was good enough to be complimentary about all of us after the first dress rehearsal he sat through. As was his wife, whose name is either Sherry or Terry, I can’t for the life of me remember which. When we were introduced, I was way too distracted by her size zero ‘look no carbs!’ frame with fake boobs that looked like they’d been stuck onto her bony little ribcage. All I know is that her name sounds a bit like a country and western singer’s.
Even more unbelievably, Jack is giving me a fairly easy ride too; in our lengthy and exhaustive notes sessions his constant refrain to me is, ‘Just do what you’re doing. And for Christ sakes, try and have a bit more confidence in yourself!’
In fact, everything is going so swimmingly, unbelievably well here that there’s only one fly in the ointment to report.
Who happens to be called Dan Ferguson.
Hard as it is to believe, I’ve been here for almost three weeks now and in all that time, he and I have had exactly two conversations. TWO. And one hardly even counts, as it was four in the morning my time, but nine in the morning his time, so I hardly even got a chance to say hi before Mrs Brophy started bellowing at him that there was a client waiting for him in the surgery with a cat that had already vomited all over the waiting room.
I’ll ring you back, he’d promised, but when he eventually did, of course I’d conked out, it being well past five am over here.
Then another time, I actually managed to get him on
the phone while we were taking a break from rehearsals, at about seven in the evening Irish time. He answered, but ended up having to hang up on me, as right then, he was trying to stay upright in slithery, knee-deep muck while attempting to get a look at the undercarriage of a maddened, manure-spurting bullock.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve left countless messages for him, both at The Moorings and on his mobile, but most of those go unanswered. And it’s hard, bloody hard and getting harder. Now I’m actually starting to get a sneaking feeling that I’m actually pestering him if I leave messages. Dear God, if I thought it was tough to deal with his being distant and remote when we were living under the same roof, try factoring in having the Atlantic ocean between us.
Nor is any of this helped by Chris either. It’s not her fault at all, it’s just that every time we’re chatting at the theatre, she’s all full of news from her husband Josh, counting the days down till he’s over for the opening night with her little boy.
‘He and I have a rota worked out to combat the time difference,’ she announces to me one day, as we walk to work together. We’re just on the busy corner of Fifth Avenue and East Forty-Fourth Street, waiting to cross the road, and she practically has to yell at me, the noise from the traffic is so deafening.
‘Anyway, I Skype Josh every single morning at nine my time, so he can tell me all about his day, then he stays up and sets the alarm so he can Skype me at ten at night my time, so I can tell him all about mine. That way we never miss out on each other’s news. Because I really feel that to sustain a successful long-distance relationship, it’s absolutely vital for two people to share all the trivial minutiae of their day with each other, when you’re so far apart. Don’t you agree?’
I’m not messing, by the way, this is actually the way she talks. Like a kind of human self-help book.
‘So what about you, Annie? How often do you get to talk to your Dan? How do you two work at keeping your relationship alive and flourishing?’
I mutter something about how busy he always is, how hard I’m finding it to keep things going, what with the time difference, and how difficult it is with the hours he works, etc, etc.
Chris, of course, being Chris, gives me one of her horrified head-girl glares, then takes full charge of the situation in her well-meaning but slightly domineering way. As it happens we’re just passing a large branch of the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Fifth, so she immediately steers me inside and marches straight to the non-fiction section, scanning through all the shelves till she finds a self-help book called, I’m not joking, The Long-Distance Relationship Bible; Keeping Your Relationship Alive From Afar.
‘Brilliant, this is exactly what I wanted. You’ll find all the answers are in here,’ she says briskly. ‘Just read this and you’ll be fine. I guarantee it.’
So that night in bed, I flip through it. A lot of practical stuff mixed in with an equal load of self-help-y shite, pretty much as you’d expect. Such as ‘laying down the communication boundaries and rules: how much contact do you need to feel comfortable and connected with your partner when you’re apart?’
Jaysus, if I got five minutes of quality time with Dan, I’d count myself lucky. And that, by the way, was when we were living under the same roof. Then there’s another bit about ‘vowing to stay tuned in at all times.’
‘To avoid making your partner feel taken for granted, try to make far more effort and pose more questions about significant things that are going on in his or her life. Phone far more often than you normally would if your parner has a big event coming up. Be supportive and let them know you care, even if you can’t physically be there.’
I actually snort laughing at this and am almost tempted to fling the book across the room, as far away from me as possible at this. Here’s me, about to open in a Broadway show, the single biggest thing that’s ever happened to me in the whole course of my career and not once, not a single time has my significant other even asked how it’s all going for me.
Then, just before I went to sleep, my eyes chanced to fall on a single paragraph which read, ‘Know Your Shelf Life. Many good long-distance relationships just don’t work out, even with the best of intentions, both parties having tried their best. Consider agreeing on an expiration date, at which point you both acknowledge your relationship is no longer working and don’t be afraid to communicate this to your partner. If one of you reaches a point where you can take no more, then you have a duty to let the other know and as quickly as possible. Many long distance relationships fail and remember, there’s no shame in this.’
Makes for lovely bedtime reading, I can tell you.
First preview night and I’m almost ready to vomit with nerves. The others are bad, but not quite as overwrought as me, given that this is my very first outing in the play in front of a live audience. We’ve spent an exhausting day in the Shubert with Jack drilling us over and over again like army recruits and now we’re on a short meal break before showtime.
I’m actually shaking, physically trembling like I’m about to face a firing squad, so Chris takes charge of me, whisking me out of the theatre and across the road to the Edison hotel on West Forty-Seventh Street, one of our little finds since we got here. It’s got a real New York diner on the ground floor that serves the most amazing matzo ball soup, which Chris reckons is the one-size-fits-all cure for just about everything; loneliness, stage fright, nerves, homesickness, the whole lot. Mind you, the state I’m in, I reckon that all food will only end up tasting like barf now.
It’s just her and me in the Edison – Liz opted for a snooze in the dressing room before the show, the only one of us sufficiently chilled out enough to actually be able to sleep at a time like this. Gym-starved little Alex strapped her iPod on and, as it’s one of those New York glass-clear days, said she was going for a brisk walk as far as Central Park to clear her head. Meanwhile the ever budget conscious Blythe always reckons eating out is an extravagance right up there with not shopping in discount stores, so she just brought in food from a local deli to eat in the theatre instead. But then that’s Blythe for you; three words you never hear slipping her lips are, ‘that’s reasonably priced’, while she maintains her favourite sentence in the whole of the English language is ‘reduced to clear.’
As usual with Chris, the chat inevitably turns to her husband and son and how she has the days counted till they’re both over for the big opening night, just three weeks away now. She politely asks me if Dan has booked his flight to come over yet…and that’s the only catalyst I need to start me off.
I don’t know if it’s just pre-show jitters, but for absolutely no reason that I can think of, I open up to her. Really open up, I mean, as opposed to smiling and obfuscating and changing the subject whenever Dan’s name is mentioned, like I normally would. Without my even knowing why, it all comes spilling out: the growing distance between us, how stifled I perpetually felt back in Stickens with him hardly ever around, the disaster that was Christmas, the bigger disaster that was our final weekend before we left…the whole shooting match.
Slowly I watched Chris’s face change from interest, to concern, to…her favourite emotion of all…white hot fury.
‘But this is outrageous!’ she says way too loudly, thumping her fist off the diner table. ‘How can you stand for this? You have GOT to do something, Annie!’
‘Ehh…I think there’s a guy on Fifty-Third Street who may not have heard you. Any chance you’d lower your voice?’
No, of course not – I’ve inadvertently handed Chris her daily jihad now and there’s no shutting her up.
‘Did he call you to wish you luck in your first preview?’
‘Well…not exactly…’
‘Did he or didn’t he? Answer me!’
‘No, but you don’t understand, the hours he works are mental; every time I phone him he’s either dealing with a bullock that’s got a bad case of diarrhoea, a vomiting cat, a racehorse with a gammy knee…I could go on and on but we’d only miss the curtain ca
ll.’
‘Totally unacceptable behaviour,’ she splutters indignantly, ‘and you know what the absolute worst thing about this is? He’s got you thinking that this is the norm. That being ignored and brushed-over is all that you deserve.’
‘No, hang on a minute there…’
‘Stop defending his behaviour. You sound like a victim of domestic abuse, standing there with two black eyes and still saying, oh but I love him!’
Shit. She’s gone off on one of her rants now and there’s no stopping her. I try my best to explain that I’m not actually married to Robert Mugabe and that Dan is actually The Nicest Man on the Planet. I mean, everyone says so. Or at least, they certainly used to. And yes, of course I’m frustrated and exasperated at how he treats me, but when it boils down to it, the only charges I can really lay at his door are thoughtlessness and being a workaholic. Aren’t they? I mean, it’s not like he cheats on me and beats me up, now is it?
‘Now you just listen to me, Annie Cole,’ Chris goes on, picking up her soup spoon and brandishing it at me, like it’s a weapon. ‘First thing tomorrow, you have GOT to call him and tell Dan that’s he’s coming over to the opening night and that’s all there is to it. Book the ticket for him if you have to, then it’s a fait accompli and he can’t wriggle out of it. All marriages need work and it’s up to him to put in a bit of effort here. For feck’s sake, Annie, does the guy have a brain tumour or something? Doesn’t he know that he’s in real danger of losing you?’
Two hours later, all my nerve ends jangling and feeling white hot terror like I’ve never known before in my life, I step out under the dazzlingly bright stage lights with closely husbanded courage and make my Broadway debut.
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow Page 15
