Disclaimer: RENT is not mine. Raise your hand if you did not know that. Now, take a picture of you raising your hand and send it to me. If you did know that RENT isn't mine, don't bother and just read the story. The same goes for Wicked. Oz, I hope I don't get many pictures. If I do, I will lose faith in humanity. -LostOzian
"Mimi, please, please could we take five?" Mark begged, crashing into the loft wall for support, gasping for breath.
"No! You're still not moving the chair fast enough, and it's going to be even harder once I'm in it!" Mimi put her hands on her hips. Seeing as there could only be a max of eight people on stage at a time with everybody doing different things, there were no dance captains, so Mimi had insisted upon mass dance rehearsals until each and every one of them could do every part while sleeping off a hangover.
However, this was torture on poor Mark Cohen. He groaned loudly, leaving sweat streaks where his forehead made contact with the wall. Mimi looked over her human material again: Mark, Benny, Collins, Roger, and Joanne. Angel and Maureen made entrances later in the Dancing Through Life scene, and she was next to useless in the Nessa chair, which left her five dancers. And it's not like they're top rate, Mimi thought, remembering her friends at the CatScratch, all of them 'professional', or at least really, really good.
"Roger, Joanne, good on your part…" Their dance looked like a tango, the 'I'll Cover You' dance, and a two-person mosh pit put together. It didn't really make sense, but looked cool, so it stayed in.
"Benny, Collins, I think five spins in those measures is too much," Mimi sang about eight bars of the song, giving them perspective of which part she was talking about. "Let's say four from now on." Rather than try to turn one of them into a girl the ten seconds they get off stage, they just had solo dances, trying to take up as much of the stage as possible.
"From the top, with the hat exit!" Mimi snapped for Maureen to take her place. Everybody obeyed, except Mark.
"Uh…" Mark said, now in a fetal position on the floor. Mimi looked at him, unimpressed.
"Fine. We'll run Wizomania again, and then go right back to this!" Roger and Collins bumped fists, preparing for their completely awesome dance, and executed it flawlessly. Benny considered saying something about how this was different from Broadway, but decided against it. They finished, and Mark was still on the floor.
"Seriously, guys, I feel sick," Mark groaned, seriously sounding like he felt sick. "Five more minutes…"
"All right, all right!" Mimi said shortly, wondering why Rogy-poo was friends with such a wimp. "Mo, Benny, run the Wonderful scene, up until the Monkeys!"
They did so, and everything was perfect. And Mark was still out of commission.
"Mark!" Roger shouted at him. "Get up!" Mark lifted his head, glaring at Roger with an emo expression.
"Lighten up, Rog," he said irritably. Mimi gasped.
"You did not just call Roger 'Rog'!" she screamed at him. Joanne started walking toward Mark, patting Mimi's arm along the way.
"I got him," she said. With a sense of purpose, she roughly pulled Mark to his feet, led him through a hasty tango, dipped him, and promptly dropped him. His head hit the floor with a dull thunk.
"Pookie!" Maureen cried. "That was mean!" Angel, having experience in doctoring injured men, gave him a quick once-over.
"Just knocked out," she reported.
"What did you knock Mark out for?" Collins asked. Joanne shrugged.
"It's okay, he'll get up," she said dismissively. Maureen looked caught between pouting and starting to cry. Because of the difficulty of deciding between the two, the resident diva settled for kneeling beside Mark's corpse-like body.
"Mark!" she said loudly. "Mark! Mark, wake up!" Mark's eyelids fluttered, then opened. "Oh, God, Mark! Are you okay?!" Mark smiled, sitting up by himself.
"Actually," he said. "I feel-"
"Yes, yes, get up, we're about to do the party scene in Dancing Through Life." Mark clapped his hands, rubbing them together.
"All right then," he said. "Let's go," Everybody exchanged glances for a moment, then got into places. Joanne caught Mimi for a second.
"Maybe this should be the first rehearsal with you in the chair," she suggested. Mimi raised her eyebrows.
"But Mark just got hit on the head," she said.
"Exactly," Joanne said. "Try it. Everything else is good, if it's not, we'll run it again." Mimi gave her another questioning look, before sitting down in the tricked-out office chair.
"Maureen, play the track," Mimi ordered. They made a few recordings of Roger's guitar for the melody line to rehearse with. "And five, six, seven, eight!"
The change was incredibly drastic. Mark had all of his cues, spins, and turns to a t, putting the other Bohemians on stage to shame.
"Okay, who are you, and what have you done with Mark Cohen?" Angel asked playfully, clapping him on the back in congratulations.
"It just… clicked," was all the explanation Mark could give.
"That's how you get something good out of Mark," Joanne said. "You have to knock him out first." Mark turned, strangely confused.
"What?" he asked, punctuating his confusion. Joanne rolled her eyes.
"When we patched?" Joanne said. "First, you…" Mark's expression changed as he remembered.
"Oh yeah!" he said, laughing slightly. "Wow…" He looked around at the cast, all staring at him like he had asked to actually audition for the Broadway staging of Wicked. However, they all had something very different in mind.
"I'll work hard!" Mark promised. "You won't have to do it opening night!"
"We'll probably do it anyway, just to be safe." Roger said. Mimi was slowly getting closer to the tape player.
"Well, now that Mark's in the zone, run No One Mourns the Wicked, in five, six-" she clicked the play button, scrambling to get into place like her friends were.
"-seven, eight!"