AN: Just a quickie update on the rehearsals. I'm not hugely satisfied with how this turned out as a chapter, it feels a bit sparse, but I think what Tim's saying needs to be said. Poor kids, it's so hard to be them. Don't worry, funtimes ahead (and some more drama, when is there not?)
Mominator: As regards Erik's false nose, he keeps it on with a strong prosthetic adhesive, adds a little liquid latex around the seam to smooth that area out, then covers with base and powders accordingly. As he would say (to paraphrase Dolly Parton), "It takes a lot of make up to look this bad." Poor pup. But it does keep the nose on through laughing fits, sweaty futon-moving adventures and multiple rides on Superman: Ride of Steel.
Disclaimer: None of the characters from any incarnation of Phantom of the Opera belong to me. Nor am I affiliated with Facebook. Any musicals, books, plays, movies, people or places referenced by me are the property of their respective owners. I am making no money off the utilization of anything with a copyright.
Father, hear thy children's call We beseech thee, hear us!
Humbly at thy feet we fall
Prodigals confessing all
We beseech thee, hear us!
We thy call have disobeyed
Into paths of sin have strayed
And repentence have delayed
-Godspell
The next two weeks rehearsals were gone through as if the entire production was on some kind of chemical stimulant. Their little audience of censors was due the next night and they insisted that the show be presented to them as 'authentically' as possible. That meant no scripts, they would expect few blocking changes between their viewing and opening night and all the costumes had to be more or less finished so that they might be deemed appropriately 'modest' by whoever it was who decided these things.
It was hard on a man who had twenty-plus years of theatrical experience and, from Tim's perspective, it seemed that the case was close to mutiny. Raoul and Christine had nothing else to judge by, they might have thought this was typical for a Memorial production and that was terribly sad for them. The others, at least, knew that things weren't normally so rushed and tense, but where Raoul and Christine just pressed on as cheerfully as possible, the others just complained. Whined would be more accurate. They were tired, they had homework, did they have to work the dances again? Well, this last was really only something that the others could comment on, Ann quickly discovered that Raoul and Christine had four left feet between them and relegated them to clapping and bopping in the back of all the big dance numbers. Even so, it got tiring just standing and swaying to music while your friends busted their asses pulling out cartwheels and backflips on command, to add some spice to a show that was getting all the joy sucked out of it in the name of propriety.
By God, this was supposed to be a fun, easy first show for the kids and it was turning into anything but that. First there was the drama with those other students who auditioned, now the university was pulling some kind of chapter and verse legal dilemma down upon their heads and why? Because some ancient prudes objected to the idea that Jesus drank wine and kept company with women of ill-repute. Never mind that the Gospels said as much, that was Holy Scripture, but God help you if a musical points those facts out to the general public. Because when there's singing and dancing involved, it becomes risque.
The kids were tired, his partner was cranky after overtime for the past week trying to alter hemlines and sew extra buttons onto cheap polyester Salvation Army cast-offs, Tim was barely holding himself together on his fifth cup of black coffee that day. Even though the reviews for Three Days of Rain had been positive, the audience turn-out wasn't anything like he hoped it would be and he was biting his nails about making the heating payments this winter. Not that anyone needed to know about that, he could manage. Rather than pay for heat in his office, he would just invest in a Snuggie and deal with frostbite when the time came. He had other things to worry about. Like over-tired actors who were grumpy about the changes to Ann's choreography in 'We Beseech Thee.'
"No, no, no," Tim said, holding a hand up to stop Gaspard on piano. His poor musical director didn't even bother giving him an exasperated look at this point, he just put his head down on the keys and settled in for a cat nap. "Freddy, for God's sake, don't wink at Erik before you go in for the double cartwheel, you're not supposed to be propositioning him. It's fun, not sexual."
Freddy looked appropriately chagrined and muttered an apology, but Erik just rolled his eyes. "You know," he said conversationally, "it's kind of hard to not think dirty thoughts when your head is against someone else's crotch, Tim."
"Well, you can't, alright," his director snapped back irritably. "Come on guys, just try the number once again from the top – Sorelli, my dear, I know you're just having fun, but please, no smacking the backsides of your fellow castmates. And Armand – any of the guys, really – when you touch Freddy...don't make it suggestive. Just...pat him on the shoulder or something. Nothing below the shoulder." It was killing him, censoring the kids like this, since they just wanted to have fun – so did he, truth be told, but there was grant money on the line and it just wasn't worth it to keep the man-on-man affection in the show.
Naturally enough, Erik was the first and loudest to rail against the restrictions. "Are you fucking kidding me? You want us to straight-man-hug him? Three strong pats on the back, that's it? That's fucked up, Tim and you know it. Isn't this show about unconditional love and all that good crap? Where's the love if we can't even touch each other?"
It occurred to Tim to point out the evident contradiction of Erik complaining about not being allowed to be affectionate with his classmates when his own personal bubble extended about five feet around his person, but he did not. All he did was state in a calm, rational voice, "Erik, I know that, you know that, we all know that, but we need to appease the people coming to watch the show. If they give us a go, I'll ease up a little, but until then - "
"I will not PANDER to them!" Erik declared passionately, pointing one long, bony finger at the empty seats, looking for all the world like a tie-dyed, bell bottomed Grim Reaper.
A testimony to how exhausted he was, Tim closed his eyes and very slowly brought his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, which he squeezed, very slightly for a full five seconds before replying. "Erik, please tell me what we're doing here."
"Rehearsing."
"Right. Rehearsing what?"
"Godspell."
"Good. And what is Godspell?"
"A musical."
"That's my smart boy. And what is your particular part in this musical?"
"Judas Iscariot."
"Well, yes, but you aren't Judas, are you? You're Erik. What is your purpose here, on this stage, right now? As Erik."
"To act."
"Exactly!" Tim's head snapped up and he held both hands at his side, calmly, though his fingers twitched a little as though he wanted to curl his hands into fists. Or maybe just squeeze them enough to choke the life out of Erik's skinny little neck.
"You are an actor! All of you are actors! And do you know what an actor's job is? Your job is to entertain people! Any actor who decides that they will act only for themselves, for their own ego or some personal sense of gratification has lost all concept of what it means to be an actor. You kids are young, I understand that, I enjoy it and I will not let you become like so many other arrogant little shits in the field who have completely lost the point of theatre."
Running a hand through his hair, Tim wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh or cry. This past week had been exhausting. Unbeknownst to the students, he'd been dragged to faculty meeting after faculty meeting, administrators expressing concern about the content of a show done in affiliation with the school. The occasional over-worked, over-zealous theology professor solemnly requesting that they be mindful that the Bible was a great tome of wisdom and to deliberately mock that tome was the worst kind of intellectual cruelty. It had been on the tip of Tim's tongue to mumble that denying two people the right to enter into the state of legal matrimony based on ancient Jewish cleanliness laws was a worse kind of intellectual cruelty, but he knew this wasn't the forum.
In the end he did not laugh or cry. He just continued talking. It had been a fucking hard week and he needed some kind of release.
"Theatre," he continued, words coming faster and more loudly in his ire, "in its purest, most unadulterated form is there to entertain people! It is your job to pander to the audience! Make them laugh, make them cry, make them feel something. If you don't give a damn about whether or not the audience feels anything after watching you, if you don't care whether or not anyone out there in that house understands your character or the piece, then you don't deserve to be on stage and I don't want you in this program or in any theatre in this country. If all you want to do up there is bitch and moan and pretend to know what art is so that you can classify yourself as an artist and scoff at all the little peons who don't respect your vision, then please, in the name of all that is good and holy, get off the fucking stage."
The rehearsal for a college production of Godspell was probably an inappropriate place to have a complete personal meltdown, but Tim had an excellent sense of timing and a flare for the dramatic that had served him well for over two decades now.
Never before had he gone on such a heated tirade about all he hated about modern theatre, especially the state of the modern musical. Ever since RENT this creeping sense of pretension was strangling all he loved about musicals, and if it wasn't the spirit of smugness coming from some weird misplaced sense of intellectual superiority, it went in the other direction entirely, to commercialism. Tim Reyer had always been a firm believer that theatre was an art form for the people, for all people. Not for the producers, not corporations and not for some subset of the self-proclaimed illuminati who got off on their own self-indulgence.
Tell a story. That was what started it all, right? One caveman turns to another caveman and grunts the approximation of, "Oh, this crazy thing happened to me back in the woods...it kind of happened like this." And then Caveman Number One gets up and re-enacts the whole thing, to the delight of Caveman Number Two. There you have it. The first actor. Of course, when Caveman Number Three comes in and demands to know what's so funny and Caveman Number One starts to re-tell, then Caveman Number Two jumps up and says, "No, not like that, do it this way, it's much better," the world saw the first director.
Tell them a good story. Make them laugh. Make them cry. Make them think, sure, but make them understand. Let them leave the theatre satisfied, curious, but not confused and, most of all, make them want to come back. They were losing something, he thought, in this weird high-tech world of Twitter and iPhones and YouTube and it was the loss of the joy of performing and seeing performances that troubled him and kept him awake at night. It's either Disney or Beckett. Personally, Tim felt that Shrek: The Musical had just as much artistic merit as "Dreamer's Mime A,"in that both were exercises in futility that were best left unperformed. Was Shrek entertaining? Maybe. For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like, but was it interesting? Absolutely not. Was "Dreamer's Mime A" interesting? Sure, but who the fuck cares?
It occurred to Tim that all the kids were staring at him with some terrible mixture of horror and awe on their faces and he felt a little winded, like he had just run for a long time without stopping for air or water. Even Erik looked like the wind had been taken out of his sails...or, more accurately, like a kicked puppy and since Tim felt like the kid's father half the time, it really wasn't a look he wanted to deal with.
Nor did he want to hear Erik stammer the words of an apology, as he was clearly gearing himself up to do now. It wasn't Erik's fault that they were dealing with a bunch of sexually repressed conservative fuckwits at this university. In all honestly, Tim didn't want to 'pander' to them either, but sometimes you had to pander. Sometimes you had to lie, manipulate and go against your own better judgment to get things accomplished. Sometimes you had to ignore your own moral compass to go with the flow; you didn't have to like it, but sometimes you had to just suck it up and do it.
This time it was Erik's turn to run a hand through his hair, deep-set eyes wide with slight shock that his mentor and father stand-in had so thoroughly reamed him out. "Tim...I'm...sorry, I didn't - "
But Tim just held up a hand to silence him. "We're on a ten, guys. Get some water, sit down, we're running the number from the top one more time, then you're done for the night."
