Chapter Seventeen
Chapter
Seventeen
“Are we really about to do this?” Danny whispered, taking his place behind the red velvet curtain.
“You’ll be great,” Nina whispered back, testing her flashlight by flicking it on and off a few times.
“What if it’s as bad as—”
“It won’t be,” Nina cut him off, not even letting him utter the now-cursed words dress rehearsal.
There was no getting around the fact that the previous evening’s rehearsal had been a bigger mess than Penn Station’s bathrooms after the St. Patrick’s Day parade—or the fact that there was really only one person to blame.
During the third number of the show, “Welcome Home,” Danny had entered from the wrong wing and immediately collided with Matteo, aka Charlemagne.
In the battle scene, there was a part where cast members crouched behind the barricade, hurling fake swords and stuffed body parts into the air.
Danny had overshot his throw, tossing his prop severed leg straight into the orchestra pit, where it landed on a clarinetist. He’d flubbed a line during “Spread a Little Sunshine” and completely missed his cue in the “Politics” scene in the second act, leaving Demetrius sitting on the throne thrumming his fingers and improvising a bit about how his “brother was always late when returning home from battle.”
“Dress rehearsals are always a train wreck,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “Just remember to breathe and trust your work,” she said, giving him a little shove. “You’ve totally got this.”
Through the curtain, Danny could hear the opening night audience’s chatter shrinking as a violin bow began playing a long drawn-out note. The violin was joined by the cellos and flutes and trumpets and then the tap-tap-tapping of Jerry’s baton on the metal music stand.
“All right, break legs,” Nina whispered.
“You too,” Danny muttered back.
The piano slinked out its first groovy vamp from the opening number, “Magic to Do.” The curtain rose, revealing a packed and darkened auditorium.
A shiver shot up Danny’s spine as Malik, the young man playing the Leading Player, stepped out from the pitch blackness and into a creamy spotlight center stage.
Danny gripped the flashlight in his hand, flicking on the switch as the cast began to hum in eerie unison.
Each cast member figure-eighted their flashlight through the air, creating thirty floating beams that rippled across the audience like searchlights. The effect was spooky, hypnotic, and somehow deeply satisfying.
To Danny’s surprise, the audience immediately applauded, clearly delighted by even the smallest touch of stage magic and musical harmony.
Their applause crackled in Danny’s chest like pine needles tossed onto a campfire, and the muscles in his shoulders slowly unclenched.
It occurred to Danny that perhaps the audience wasn’t only there to judge his work, to peer with skeptical eyes, waiting for him to fuck up—that it was far more likely that they were really just looking for an excuse to dump their troubles in the lobby and listen to some pretty music for a couple of hours.
The opening number pattered on, the cast pairing each lyric with choreographed flashlight motions. In the second verse where the main characters are introduced, the ensemble stepped forward and crouched, shining their flashlights at each soloist’s face, creating a makeshift spotlight.
Nina belted out her first line, daring the audience not to be impressed. Esther, the girl playing Berthe, followed with a dry, deadpan delivery that somehow landed just as hard.
“Romance, sex presented pastorally,” two girls from the ensemble purred, circling their hips seductively.
And then it was time for Danny to sing.
He stepped forward, blinded by the spotlight glow. “Illusion, fantasy to study.”
The second he finished the phrase, he breathed a sigh of relief.
He hadn’t flubbed the line, or missed the entrance, or sung the notes wrong.
And then, like it was no big deal, the song just kept going.
It was almost overwhelming for Danny to think of how many moments like this made up their two-hour show, how many times everyone had to say the right line or hand off the right prop, how many hundreds of thousands of microscopic little choices every actor on that stage had to make just to keep the story chugging along.
And even though Danny had only cleared the first tiny hurdle, he had already accomplished something that had been unthinkable just a few months before.
He had just sung his first line in his first-ever musical and no one in that audience could say that he hadn’t.
Following the opening number, the show whizzed on, and Danny’s feet somehow steered him to all the right spots. He’d been afraid of repeating every error, every fuckup, every flubbed line from the night before, but it turned out, every show was a new start, a new chance to get things right.
In his first big scene with Demetrius, Danny was surprised to realize that he was no longer nervous.
He spoke with confidence and gestured bravely, and when his punch lines were met with intoxicating laughter from the audience, Danny soaked it all in, instantly addicted.
With every laugh, every clap, every gasp, he grew more and more certain he’d probably spend the rest of his life chasing this special brand of high.
“Morning Glow,” the song buttoning the end of Act One, was met with riotous applause, and Danny wandered down the hallway to the dressing rooms, his feet barely touching the floor.
Back slaps and beaming faces passed him, everyone ecstatic, everyone realizing that they were creating a thing that people actually seemed to be enjoying.
“You got anyone out there?” Matteo asked Demetrius as they sat in front of the mirror of their dressing room, Matteo re-dusting his mane of hair with baby powder to make it look more gray.
“Yeah, pretty much my whole family,” Demetrius said, taking a swig from his Gatorade bottle. “My mom bought, like, two whole rows of seats the day I got cast. Apologies in advance for them acting like fools during the curtain call. How ’bout you?”
“Same,” Matteo grunted. “Plus my aunt made T-shirts with my headshot on them. I’m actually so embarrassed.”
“What about you, Danny?” Demetrius asked. “You got some family out there?”
Danny’s blood froze at the mention of “family.” He had, in fact, bought a ticket for Ma earlier that week.
“Aw jeez, Danny,” his mom had sighed, opening the ticket envelope that morning over breakfast. “I work nights on Fridays. You know that.”
“Right,” Danny said to his cereal bowl. “I just thought…”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m still new there.”
“Of course. Don’t worry about it,” Danny said, taking a bite of his Cheerios.
“Yeah,” Danny said, picking up a comb and slicking it through his hair. “Probably not as many folks as you guys, though.”
Act Two just didn’t seem to have the same kind of electricity.
Every time Danny caught a glance at the audience, he became painfully aware that all of these people belonged to someone.
They were parents and uncles and grandmothers and family friends and people from church and people from their father’s office.
And even though they seemed to laugh at Danny’s goofy South Shore caricature, the person who would have found it the funniest was at this moment likely putting in another load of whites.
But the voices in his head, trying to make him feel sorry for himself were no match for the score of the composer, Stephen Schwartz.
Danny couldn’t help but groove along, watching in awe from the wings as Demetrius and Malik brought down the house with their jazzy “On the Right Track,” and he marveled at Tiffany Totter bringing everyone to tears as she sang her torch song, “I Guess I’ll Miss the Man.
” And even with the absence of his mother, Danny couldn’t help but rejoin the utter magic of an opening night, standing in a semicircle in the final scene, singing about the “sun” and “its golden glance.”
The character Pippin had this song called “Corner of the Sky.” It was kind of the theme song for the entire show, all about wanting to be like a river or an eagle, and honestly, it got reprised so many times that Danny found it borderline annoying.
But as Demetrius sang its final reprise, something clicked in Danny that made him hear it differently.
The song was all about wanting to have a place where you belonged, to find that corner of the sky where everything finally made sense.
Here under the warm spotlights, in a crowded auditorium, wearing the clothes of a person who wasn’t him, Danny, like Pippin, began to finally see that spot on the horizon, that corner of the world where he might actually fit in.
As he stood shoulder to shoulder with his castmates who had just created something beautiful, the door that had been locked for so many years began to slowly creak open.
When Danny sang along with twenty-nine other voices and his body moved in unison with twenty-nine other bodies, all of the noise that clanked in his head like an old pipe in the winter seemed to quiet into a soft hum.
And there were no missing parents or smoke-filled kitchens or nights spent alone in rooms with green rugs.
Onstage, no one laughed at him unless he wanted them to.
Onstage, every word he said was written and spell checked and perfected and sometimes even set to music.
And even if that magical feeling would last for only two hours that night, maybe he could carry a tiny bit of it with him until he could find another two.