CAT: It pays to be observant when there’s danger close at hand / The things that scare us most are things we just don’t understand.
-The Glass Flute, Scene vii
The rest of that day, the cast of The Glass Flute worked with the kind of demented, desperate energy usually saved for the kind of opening night when the set’s not finished, half the costumes are missing and the lead actor arrives drunk. Oddly enough, the morning storm had cleared the air a good bit, and I actually caught Meredith and Shane running lines together, staring into one other’s eyes with the intensity of championship chess players, each daring their opponent to make a mistake.
As soon as Ruth arrived, we set up for a run. Rico, who had come in with me that morning and was downstairs still working with Kim and Sam, came up to the studio and told us he’d ordered a couple of on-the-house pizzas from his uncle’s place, Amato’s, across the river. The cast agreed to a half-hour lunch break, provided that the company paid the Equity lunch-hour infringement. Juliet’s premature preview was going to cost the company a pretty penny, and we all agreed that that was only fair. There was a “them and us” feeling in the studio—the cast against the management, and rather sadly, against our poor, unsuspecting preview audience, who could hardly help the fact that the command performance was creating hardship for the entertainers. Heck, they’d probably have preferred to stay at home. I know I would.
We arranged to do three runs, the first with music, but no black hoods, working under the regular fluorescent overheads, so the cast could see what they were doing. The second, after a break, would be done with the UV lights on, to make the puppets glow, but still with no hoods, then the last would be a real dress rehearsal, hoods on, peripheral vision zero. The staff of Steamboat agreed to come and be a test audience for that one, and we figured we wouldn’t get to it until after the dinner break, so Juliet would be able to see it, too.
I had agreed to be backstage for the preview, prompting (on book), in case anybody lost it so completely that they needed to be fed a line. Usually, stage managers are at the opposite end of the playing space from the actors, either in a booth or at a table at the back, calling lighting and sound cues (or running them) and taking notes. There were no lighting cues for The Glass Flute, because everything was done under UV light. Well, I guess there were two—“ON” and “OFF”. Under normal circumstances, I would be running the show tapes from out front. Being backstage was weird, because I couldn’t see very much of the action. Still, the actors were all suffering from chronic Yikes, so it was only fair that I was there sharing it with them. Fine tuning would come later, when we were on the road and everything had settled down.
At its proper pace, the show runs just under an hour. It’s for kids, so there’s no intermission, no chance for the young audience to lose the thread of the story. It’s action-packed, colourful and exuberant, designed to hold onto the fragile thing that is a modern child’s attention span. Juliet Keating knows her market. The Glass Flute fits very nicely into a school schedule, to be played in the first class period of the day, or the first one directly after lunch. This means, on tour, that you’re on the road at seven in the morning, toting barges and lifting bales to get set up by showtime at nine-thirty. If you want to know what this is like, imagine how fine your voice sounds during your morning shower, then imagine that you’re singing that same shower song in front of two hundred pint-sized critics, after having just rearranged your office furniture by yourself, dressed up in your best duds afterwards without benefit of a shower, climbed up on your desk under a harsh spotlight and struck a pose. There are reasons for calling this kind of theatre work “paying one’s dues.”
Sometimes, when a cast is under-rehearsed, a kind of magic sets in. It’s born of adrenaline, mostly, a distillation of the actors’ perception of what their roles are supposed to be, without enough time for the director’s vision to have had a marked effect. It’s scattered, but inspired. The first run had this quality. It truly sparkled.
The actors kept to the script most of the time, and if a line was lost, Ruth filled in with a bit of improvised music. If there had been anybody in the audience, they wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss. After the final moment, we all burst into a spontaneous chorus of self-congratulatory whoops and hollers, which felt wonderful.
“That was fantastic, you guys,” Ruth said. “You could take it on the road tomorrow.”
“We’re going to,” Meredith said, but with good humour.
Shane ran a hand through his hair and then looked at his palm.
“Brad, in that last bit, just before your dragon spurts fire, can you get the big guy’s head a little higher? I got a mouthful of smoke that time, and I swear a couple of sparks landed in my hair.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Brad said. “I think I pressed the button a little early.” The trigger for the dragon flashpot was in the head of the puppet, and it was up to Brad to fire it. I knew it was going to be a problem. Brad wasn’t terribly accurate when it came to cues.
“That’s one cue you have to be sure you don’t jump,” I said. “It’s distracting, eh?”
“Won’t happen again,” he said.
“Shane, don’t worry about the flashpots,” I said. “That stuff is designed to combust instantly. The sparks aren’t fire sparks, they’re glitter.”
“Tell that to my hairdresser,” he said.
“You’ll be wearing your hood,” I said. “All the costumes, drapes—the whole schmeer is treated with flame retardant.”
“My head isn’t,” Shane said.
“We won’t do the flashpots for the next run,” I said. “We’ll put them back in for the dress run tonight, okay?”
“Fine with me,” Shane said. “Thanks.”
“Scared of a little puff of smoke?” Meredith said.
“Frankly, Miss Equity Deputy, yes. Can’t you write a risk clause into my contract?”
The diversion to duty worked like a charm. Meredith seemed to give the suggestion serious consideration.
“I suppose we could,” she said. “I never thought of that. We should all have one of those. Who knows what could happen? I’ll have to check the Green Book.” She hurried away to get the Equity book from her purse.
“Thanks, Shane,” I said, the sarcasm as thick as butter.
“No problem,” he said, grinning. “It’ll keep her occupied.”
“Polly, the waist belt inside the serpent costume is a little snug,” Amber said. “Could you loosen it for me?”
Shane looked at her belly with a small, smug expression on his face. Of course. The measurements Amber’s agent had sent with her contract had been taken, presumably, before she was pregnant. Although I assumed, when she’d told me, that she was only a little way along in the gestational process—early enough for her to be legally able to terminate the pregnancy—there’s still an immediate thickening and tightening of the midriff. Amber caught Shane’s look and returned it with one of her own, a very private one that embarrassed me a bit. With Jason out of the way, it appeared that the two had sort of claimed one another. I wondered if the young actress would really go through with an abortion.
“Bring it over here and I’ll adjust it,” I said. “The buckles just need easing off a bit, probably.”
“Ruth, can we take a moment to go over the Axe Song?” Brad said to her. “It went a lot faster in that run than we rehearsed it.”
“That was your tempo, not mine,” Ruth said. “You trotted through that number like your pants were on fire.”
“I know,” Brad said. “Nervous. You were just keeping up, I guess.”
“Damn right. I tried to slow you down and ended up a couple of bars behind you. Here, let’s do it now.”
The second run after lunch, with the UV lights on and the overhead fluorescents off, was chaotic. Although there was enough daylight in the space to allow the actors to see each other, and they were performing hoodless, the added element of UV-activated puppets and props was disorienting.
“You get sort of hypnotized by them,” Amber said afterwards.
“Yeah, like you’re supposed to look at the puppets when you’re manipulating them, and when you look away, you can still see them,” Brad said.
“I wonder if working under UV light is dangerous,” Shane said, looking at Meredith. “Are we all going to get headaches and blurred vision?”
Meredith thought for a minute. “I didn’t have anything like that last time,” she said, “but I think we should watch out for it. With the pyrotechnics and the UV light, we may have to have a rider attached to our contracts, Polly.”
I glared at Shane, who winked at me. “You can take it up with Juliet after the run tonight, Meredith. You’re all covered under the Equity insurance policy—that should be enough, unless you’re talking about danger pay. I doubt she’ll go for it.”
“The Equity insurance, is that the thing that says you get, like $4,000 if you lose an arm, and $350 per eye, that sort of thing?” Amber said. “I thought that was sick when I saw it in my contract package.”
“It’s standard,” I said. “I guess they keep the settlements low so you won’t be maiming yourself on purpose to collect the cash.”
“Like, I’m really going to poke my eye out so I can pay my rent this month,” Amber said.
“Exactly.”
For the dinner break, the cast decided to hit the Burger Barn downtown.
“Take the van, so none of you gets lost,” I said, shifting instantly into mother-hen-mode. “We want to start the dress run dead on time.”
“Aren’t you coming?” Shane said.
“No, I’ve got to wire the flashpots and check the preset,” I said.
“You want us to pick you up anything?”
The Burger Barn, originally a drive-in, had been a fixture in Sikwan since the fifties and had miraculously survived, in spite of a McDonald’s franchise opening a few doors down. Its dressed-up hotdogs all had bizarre dog-names. A Lucky Lassie had American cheese on it, and the Schnauzer came with sauerkraut and was served on a kaiser. The burgers, in various forms, were named after heavy machinery. It enjoyed a kind of cult-status in town, having achieved a degree of nostalgic cool that no big-corporation advertising budget could ever manufacture. The current owners, a Portuguese family who had immigrated to Canada in the early seventies, didn’t bother putting ads in the papers or on the radio. They just smiled happily, remembered their customers’ names, flipped burgers on an immaculate grill, hired high school students (who stayed on for years) and raked in the bucks. Why mess with a good thing?
I ordered a Bulldozer (double patty with fried onions) and some onion rings. Normally, I don’t eat fast food, but it had been a long day with no end in sight, and sometimes a good dose of saturated fat is just what you need.
“What happened to the health regimen?” I asked Meredith, as I gave her the van keys.
“Rules are made to be broken,” she said. “Just ask Juliet.”
“Point taken,” I said, and we exchanged a reasonably friendly smile. Things were looking up.
Ten minutes later, as I was carefully wrapping thread around an electric match, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs.
“Polly?” Becker said. “They said I’d find you up here. We have to talk.”