“We’re hired to create the show the producer pays us to,” Tyreek said, cutting Eugene off. “I get it. This isn’t the process any of you expected, but it’s the one we have. I’m going to ask that you work with us. Trust me, we’re working as hard as we can.”
Mabel looked at Tyreek and added, “We all have a job to do. Our job is to write a show. Your job is to put that show on. We wished we had a fully developed show on day one, but that’s not how it turned out. I suspect it’s not the last curveball we’ll be thrown—to pick up on Eugene’s baseball metaphor.”
“Err…thanks, guys,” Eugene said, clearly getting his bearings again. “Our goal is to walk you through the current vision of the show. We’re hoping that when San Nicolás gets back from his meeting, we’ll have a better idea of…well, we’ll know if the show is going forward as is or if more major rewrites are coming down the pipeline.” Eugene looked at everyone expectantly. No one asked questions or appeared to have any qualms with the group’s process that morning. “Great, let’s open our scripts to page one. We might as well sing the first song. We haven’t changed anything on it at all, but the dialogue after the song differs from the steel barons…ghosts…I mean, now elves. Geez, I need some sleep,” he mumbled as he sat down at the piano.
He started playing the now-familiar tune, and the cast joined in. We read through each scene, then Eugene and Tyreek would sing the song that would happen. If there wasn’t a song yet, Eugene or Tyreek would explain the general direction of the score. A couple of times, one of them would tell us what would happen next, and the group would groan. Either Eugene or Tyreek would be like, “Okay, maybe that was a bad idea.”
There were a few giant plot holes in the script and Mable would tell us she’s working it out. By the time noon got there, we’d finished the first run-through of the new material, and I had to admit, it didn’t totally suck. Sure, with each passing day, our new musical looked less and less like the movie it was supposedly based on, but that’s show business.
“Hey, how are things going in your world?” Katherine asked, sidling up next to me.
“Things are going well. The show looks less and less like a disaster. I think we’ve passedCarrieterrain and are heading toward the NBCGrinchmusical.”
“Ouch! The reworks aren’t that bad.”
“True, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. At this rate, we’ll have a show bad enough to ruin anyone’s Christmas,” I groused.
“Tell me how you really feel, Mrs. Grinch,” Katherine joked as she narrowed her eyes at me.
“I know. It’s not that bad. Just out of it is all. A lot of weird things are happening, and I’m still trying to make sense out of it all.”
“Let me guess,Blinded by Faith?”
“You’ve heard?”
“I heard it was published. What type of hatchet job did Michelle Bouvier do to you?”
“That’s it,” I stammered, “She was nice. Very nice. It was like she went out of her way to make me sound like the golden child of Broadway. She practically makes me seem like some musical theater saint.”
“And this is a bad thing, how?” Before I could respond, she then asked, “Wanna go to lunch and talk about it?”
“Sure.”
We grabbed our coats and purses before heading out into the cold. Kappel yelled after us to be back in an hour as we left. Technically, we weren’t supposed to have that long at lunch, but if the director-stand-in tells us to take a long lunch, that’s precisely what we planned to do.
We went around the corner to a diner that was always fast and cheap. We were seated at a booth in the back, away from staring eyes and prying ears. Between being seated, getting menus, ordering, and receiving our food, I told Katherine everything that had happened after I left rehearsal yesterday.
“You really had no idea this book was coming out?” Katherine asked between bites of her grilled chicken and roasted asparagus.
“Not a clue. I didn’t know a book about the show was being written. No one contacted me or asked if I wanted to say anything on or off the record.”
“And Brice didn’t know either?”
“He said he knew a book was coming out about the show, but he figured it was a coffee table-type book.”
“I could see how he thought that, but don’t those usually come out while the show is still running? The only people who buy those books are theater geeks and tourists who saw the show on Broadway and want the book as a memento.”
“Hey, I own a few of those books. My favorite one is theAvenue Qbook with the orange furry cover.”
“As I said,” Katherine said, pointing at me with her fork, “theater geeks.”
She had me there, so I laughed and shrugged slightly. I had been a high school theater nerd through and through. I had wanted to be on Broadway since I watched a touring production ofThe Phantom of the Operaas a child. The tour was okay, but I fell in love with the whole idea of musical theater after seeing that show.
“What are you doing tonight?” Katherine asked.
I snapped my attention back to her. My mind had wandered. “Say again?”
“I asked, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ You really are in a funk today, aren’t you?”
