It wasn’t until much later that morning that we finally got to hear Tiffany sing.
By then we’d worked out the basic moves for the first section and Peregrine said that right after the tea break he wanted to do it all again, this time with music. “At this early stage I expect it to be more of a stagger than a walk-through,” he said. “But it will at least give us a sense of the direction we’re heading in.”
His words were greeted with an expectant buzz of chatter and even I felt quite excited.
Tiffany went off to her dressing room “to mentally compose herself” and “get into character” but everyone else stayed on the stage. While the grown-ups drank tea and scoffed biscuits they also did a lot of whispering in a lot of corners. I had a glass of orange squash in one hand and my script in the other – open, as if I was trying to memorize it. As I wandered about casually I managed to overhear a few snatches of muttered conversations.
There was a whole load of not-very-generous speculation from Brad, Timothy and Rex about whether Tiffany’s voice would be any good. Hannah didn’t say anything, but she sniggered nastily when Rex said he “fully expected our star to have the vocal quality of a rusty harmonica”.
Elizabeth wasn’t catty but she looked anxious when she told Cynthia, “I do hope Tiffany’s going to be good enough. She had a dreadful cold when Peregrine auditioned her. He had to take her agent’s word for it that she could sing.”
I studied our director for a second. He was sitting bolt upright in the front row of the stalls and sipping his tea – “no milk, just a slice of lemon” – from a bone china cup. His face looked perfectly calm but his shoulders had risen to just below his ears and were a dead giveaway: he was a worried man.
Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.
After the break we started the show from the beginning. Pretty soon we’d reached the scene when Dorothy’s sitting alone on stage. Us kids were crammed into the wings ready to come on when the house gets carried to Munchkinland.
As the opening chords of “Over the Rainbow” struck up I glanced across at Hannah. She was staring fixedly at Tiffany, her black-lipsticked mouth twisted into a grimace of undiluted spite. She was literally licking her lips in anticipation as Tiffany opened her mouth and drew in a breath.
A sweet, pure sound electrified the stage and filled the auditorium. When Tiffany sang it made goosebumps ping up all over my arms. It wasn’t just that she hit the right notes – she filled them with such sad longing that it cut right through me and brought tears to my eyes. It was amazing.
“The voice of an angel,” Cynthia muttered. “Oh, I wish poor Geoff had been here to listen. He would have loved it!”
Everyone was utterly awestruck by her performance. Well, nearly everyone. Rex, Brad and Timothy looked extremely disappointed: they’d banged on so much about how TV actors couldn’t perform on the stage that it must have annoyed them to be proved wrong.
But if they were cross, Hannah was incandescent.
When Tiffany had started the song, Hannah’s jaw had dropped and her heavily mascaraed eyes had grown wide. But her reaction quickly moved from astonishment to shock and then to confusion. By the time Tiffany had finished singing – to a spontaneous burst of applause from the rest of the cast and wildly enthusiastic congratulations from Peregrine – Hannah’s expression had changed again. I’d never seen anything so clearly written on anyone’s features.
Hannah was feeling positively murderous.
At lunch time, when I was coming back from the toilets, another odd thing happened. Hannah and Rex were in the corridor behind the stage and no one else was about. As I got nearer I caught a snippet of their conversation.
“Are you quite sure?” Rex demanded. His hands were on Hannah’s shoulders and he was staring intently into her face.
“Positive,” she said.
“Good heavens! Who would have believed it?”
When they saw me they sprang apart and didn’t say anything else. I don’t suppose I’d have thought any more about it if they hadn’t looked so guilty. And the fact that they’d been standing so close together was odd too: it was like they knew each other really well. Yet on stage they’d always behaved like perfect strangers.
By the afternoon we’d reached the first big dance routine: the one where Dorothy’s house crash-lands and she heads off along the yellow brick road towards the Emerald City. Graham and I had originally been told by Cynthia that all we’d have to do was sit and waft from side to side but it turned out to be more complicated than that. Even though we were plants and therefore should – in theory – have been rooted to the spot, we were supposed to get up and twirl full circle three times on three separate occasions during the song. It took a fair bit of concentration to do it without getting our limbs entwined but we managed without a fuss, which was a lot more than could be said for the Munchkins.
I’ve never seen so many kids trying so hard to outdo each other. Once the music started they all wanted to sing louder, smile brighter and dance better than anyone else. Everyone was desperate to be noticed. The girls put in their own little twirls and flounces with each step, and the boys ended up elbowing each other out of the way so they could be at the front. When a fist fight broke out among the male Munchkins, Tiffany got knocked backwards and ended up sitting in the flower bed with me and Graham. She wasn’t hurt but Jason ran in from the wings completely freaked. I thought he was worried about Tiffany but after he’d helped her up he had a major hissy fit, shrieking at us kids about the sensitivity of the sound equipment and how much it would cost to replace anything that got broken.
It was too much for Graham’s nerdy curiosity. When Jason paused to draw breath Graham put his hand up as if we were still at school and said, “Excuse me. I’ve always understood theatre equipment to be remarkably robust. Could you tell me which system you’re using?”
Jason turned red but didn’t answer. Luckily we were spared a detailed account of the technical complexities by Peregrine impatiently waving Jason off the stage. “Let’s get on shall we? We’ve a lot to get through.”
Peregrine had to do a whole load of shouting to make the kids work together that afternoon. “You’re a team,” he kept yelling. “Not a collection of prima donnas. You’re here to support Tiffany, not upstage her.”
Only Graham and I did exactly as we were told. We followed the instructions to the letter – did the floral thing with no twiddly bits, no extra steps, no arguing. It was on account of this – Peregrine called it our Solid Professional Approach – that we ended up getting extra roles. To audible sighs of disgust from the other kids, Peregrine announced that he’d chosen us to be the flying monkeys in the second half. We would kidnap Dorothy and whisk her away to the witch’s castle.
I was madly excited about it. It would be the ideal opportunity to observe Tiffany close up. We’d be right in the thick of things and I’d really get to find out what made her tick.
But Graham was less thrilled. “Do you know what the likelihood is of us both getting irreversible muscular strain?” he asked. “I read somewhere that flying in a stage harness is physically very demanding. We could be damaged for life.”
“You have to suffer for art,” I told him. “You ought to be pleased. The other kids would kill for these parts. Did you see their faces? They looked vicious.”
I didn’t realize anyone was listening until two heavy hands landed on our shoulders, fingernails digging in like claws, and Rex boomed, “Darlings, you have the envy of your fellows to contend with. Such is the price of success. And as if that’s not enough, you also run the risk of falling in the path of Tiffany’s insane stalker.” There was a faint trace of menace in his voice when he added with a smile, “If you two survive until opening night, it will be a miracle.”