“This is really generous of you,” I said, taking the clipboard.
“Nonsense. This town has been our theater’s home for decades. A bit of glue and glitter and fabric is the least we can do. Ah, you’ve discovered our wig collection, I see,” Veronica added, her gaze falling on Bea. I turned to see Bea taking a deliberate step away from the nearest wig head.
“I didn’t touch anything,” she said quickly, looking mortified.
“Whyever not?” Veronica asked, smiling. “That was my favorite thing to do as a child.” She walked around the nearest cutting table, so that she stood right beside Bea. “Go on. Which one is your favorite?”
Bea barely glanced at the wigs. “I… I don’t know.”
“Oh, come now. There must be one you like! I think I’ll pick… this one,” Veronica said, seizing a wig that looked like it might have rolled right off Marie Antoinette’s neck when she was beheaded. She shook her own glossy hair back from her face, and slipped the wig on her head, tucking and adjusting it in the mirror until it was just right. “There now. What do you think?”
Bea couldn’t help but smile just a little. She gave Veronica a thumbs up, and Veronica laughed.
“Now it’s your turn. There must be one you’d like to try on!”
Bea hesitated another moment and then, her smile widening, she pointed to a wig on the far end of the display. The long, shiny hair was a kaleidoscope of colors—turquoise and seafoam green and vibrant lavender. Starfish and seashells had been woven into a few of the scattered braids. It looked like the hair of a mermaid or a water sprite.
“Excellent choice,” Veronica said, clapping her hands in delight. She pulled it from the wig head with a flourish, and helped put it on Bea’s head. She straightened and adjusted it for a moment before turning Bea by the shoulders to face a mirror on the wall. As Bea’s face split into a real grin, so did Veronica’s. “You see? It’s like magic!” she said.
For the next hour or so, Eva, Zale, and I collected the necessary materials, while Bea and Veronica continued to try on wigs. Finally, when we had found everything we needed, we recorded it all on the clipboard, and loaded it into a pair of cloth tote bags.
“Oh, are you finished already?” Veronica asked. She and Bea were wearing identical blonde pageboy wigs.
“Yeah. Thanks again,” Zale said. “I should really get back up to the rehearsal. Goddess only knows if they’ve all just fallen off their stilts and broken their necks. I suppose I’m not that lucky.”
“Are they really that hard to manage?” I asked.
“It’s like herding kittens, Wren. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“Do you think it would help if I came to tomorrow’s rehearsal? I can bring the finished costume pieces and help you wrangle everyone,” I offered.
“Could you really?” Zale asked, looking relieved. “I could really use the help. This whole directing thing is a lot harder than I thought it would be.”
“I’d be happy to,” I said earnestly. “Don’t worry, Zale. I’ve never let a show go up without everyone being whipped into shape, and I’m not going to let you, either. Have you had any luck improving the script?”
Zale rolled his eyes. “No, and it’s probably too late to do anything about it. By the time I manage to write anything worth performing, there won’t be any time to learn it. I think we’re probably stuck with the script we’ve got.”
“Well, we’ll do our best with what we’ve got, then,” I said, “and hope that the costumes are cool enough to distract from the words.”
Back at Eva’s house,we worked for several more hours on the costumes, doing our best to bring Bea’s vision to life. Maricela came up to join us, assisting with some stitching and hemming, while Bea was hard at work painting the masks. By the time I left, we’d made good progress, and we agreed to meet up again the next day to finish what we could before the next evening’srehearsal. It was important to rehearse in the full costumes as much as possible, to make sure the actors could maneuver the way they needed to without tripping, or getting tangled up.
Bea was as talented with a paint brush as she was with a pencil. The masks, when she had finished with them, were truly works of art. The face of the Holly King was that of a silvery, apple-cheeked Father Christmas, with a beard made of glittery cotton batting that we tucked twinkle lights inside of, so that it looked like a storm cloud impregnated with lightning. Icicles made of glue dangled from the tip of his nose and the line of his jaw. The Oak King was the embodiment of the forest in summer, all greenery and blossom and trailing vine. His hair and beard were braided of fiery red, orange, and yellow, and his crown looked like the sun coming over the horizon of his head. Even Sergei and Ethan stopped goofing around long enough to look impressed when we carried it all into the rehearsal that night. It was an arduous process, getting all the pieces to work together —tying and pinning and adjusting, until before us stood two apparitions of the seasons, at once beautiful and terrible, looking like they had sprung to life from the pages of a children’s storybook.
“I think I’m going to cry,” Zale said, when we were finally able to stand back and admire our handiwork.
“Try to hold off until they start moving around in them,” I said. “Depending on how it goes, you might really want to cry.”
Maricela entered with the costumes for the wood nymphs and the frost fairies. All the girls started squealing over the trailing, glittering skirts and the tiara-like headpieces. They immediately pulled out their phones, looking up makeup tutorials that would compliment their costumes, and comparing hairstyles accented with bright flowers or wintry snowflakes.
“I’ve got just the right palettes to do these,” Kaia promised, and for the first time, the cast looked excited rather thanapathetic. It was precisely the shift in attitude we needed to start practicing again. I’d seen it a hundred times: the magic of seeing oneself transformed into a character that suddenly feels real. It always breathed new life into the homestretch of rehearsals, reinvigorating everyone’s enthusiasm. And we needed all the enthusiasm we could get, because we had a lot of work to do in a short amount of time.
We spent the next three hours working through the choreography step by step. The nymphs and the Oak King had to move as one unit, matching the swing of the arms to the teetering steps of the body. The frost fairies and the Holly King had to do the same, and all of it with a smoothness and synchronicity that made the onlooker forget they were watching a puppet and a group of puppeteers. We kept them motivated by taking videos of their progress and then playing them back for them, so they could see from an audience’s perspective how it would look. Then Luca saved the day by drawing open the black backdrop to reveal a wall of mirrors. Now the actors could watch the effects of their coordination in real time, and they improved much more quickly. Zale had chosen sweeping instrumental music to play under the action, and the addition of beats they could count helped to keep them all moving together. In just a single rehearsal, we managed to evolve from chaos to some semblance of working together. It wasn’t nearly ready for an audience, but it no longer seemed impossible that it could be by the end of the week. Even Sergei and Ethan allowed themselves to express a modicum of enthusiasm for the performance. The subtle shift in their behavior revealed that, though they loved fooling around in rehearsals, they didn’t actually want to look like fools in front of the whole town.
“All right, that’s all we can do for tonight,” Zale called when Luca appeared to lock up at ten. “Same time tomorrow, and don’t forget to practice your lines!”
“Everyone, hang your costumes up! The hangers are labeled; find the one with your name! And all props go back on the prop table!” I shouted, as everyone broke into conversation. “Don’t forget to check the list of things you need to bring with you for tomorrow’s rehearsal. It’s posted on the door at the back of the house!”
There was the general scrum around the costume rack, followed by the milling about as people gathered their belongings, and made their noisy progress out of the theater. I sighed and went over to tidy the rack, which, despite the clear instructions, looked like a jumbled mess. Luckily, I’d labeled everything with the actors’ names, so they were easy to identify when they inevitably fell off the hangers.
