“That’s why I told Michelle Bouvier everything that had happened…off the record.”
“What?” That was one revelation I had most definitely not expected.
“Yep. I had heard she was writing a tell-all book about the show, so I had my agent get her number. I called her directly. At first, she had thought I was trying to pressure her to stop writing the book. I did the exact opposite. I told her everything.”
“But you made yourself the villain of the whole thing?” still in utter shock.
“It was true, though. I was the villain.”
I guess he really has grown up.“So why now? Why this show?”
“Well, you may have heard about a little scandal on a movie set…” he asked, his voice trailing off.
“That was another article by Bouvier, from what I remember.”
“Yep, Michelle and I have definitely become bosom buddies this last year,” he said with a sigh.
“You leaked the story about your affair with the casting agent?” I asked a bit incredulously.
“No, and sadly, I didn’t sleep with anyone involved in casting. It was totally made-up drama. I wanted out of the shoot because the set was toxic.”
“How so?”
“The director and his husband kept pushing for a ménage à trois, but I brushed off their advances. I called up Michelle and asked for advice on starting a rumor that would be scandalous enough to get me fired but not so serious that it would destroy my career. As you can see, it worked. Everyone on the set got that it was a lie because the casting team was all women. Still, Hallmark doesn’t want to put any movies in their lineup associated with scandal, so I was quietly asked to leave the project.”
“Wow,” was all I could muster. Part of me was saddened by all of this because it was clearly another incident of Asher getting his way through deceit, but part of me understood why he did it.
“Can you ever forgive me?” he asked.
I looked into his eyes and he was crying. Asher was expressing a genuine emotion, something I was surprised that he had the capability of doing. “I…forgive you.” The words were out of my mouth before I’d even registered them in my brain. It wasn’t like a magical weight was suddenly lifted off my shoulders. But forgiving him was easier than hating him. Besides, I was stuck working with him either way.
“Excuse me,” Aarya suddenly said, walking up to us. “Everyone’s in the theater waiting for you two to return.”
“Oh geez! Sorry, we totally lost track of time,” I said.
“It’s totally my fault,” Asher started. “I cornered Erika.”
“I don’t care,” Aarya said. “Your business is your business. Just get your elf-y butts back in the theater before Eldridge blows the North Pole.”
We hurried through the halls and into the theater. The rest of the cast was all on stage. Their attention was split between watching the creative team, who was still engaged in a heated conversation, and the other half were staring at Asher and me. I’m sure they wanted to see if I’d clawed Asher’s eyes out. I pasted on a smile.
Out of nowhere, San Nicolás threw a clipboard to the ground and started strewing a series of Spanish words that I’m sure translated roughly to “I hate you. I hate you. Go elf yourself, you…you candy cane sucker.”
Chapter 17
Therestoftheweek was a blur of activity. From new script pages to song rewrites to finally getting into the blocking and choreography, the cast and crew were exhausted after their six days of rehearsal. Thankfully, the show was starting to look like an actual show for the first time. This was great since we were supposed to finally get access to the big theater on Monday. After a couple of delays, Rebekka squeezed every worker she could to ensure everything on the stage would be ready to work with the following Monday.
On Thursday, the set designer explained how everything would work. The biggest pieces of the set were supposed to be delivered on Saturday and Sunday, so we’d be able to rehearse on the actual stage early the following week. The set designer was this little old woman who was maybe 4‘5“, but she had enormous energy, and had at least six Tony Awards for her work on various plays and musicals. She worked with a design team in Jersey who built the set in a giant warehouse. It would be dismantled there and then brought to Broadway on semi-trucks over the weekend. Her on-site construction team would then systematically put the set back together inside the theater.
“If you see a man in a hard hat, stay out of his way,” the designer told us. “Do not interrupt. Do not go take a peek to see what it looks like when they are working. You will get access to the stage when it is safe, not one second sooner.”
The Maurer Theatre’s stage was on the second floor of the building, so large elevators at the back of the building would lift everything from the ground level to the stage level where it would be reassembled. And despite the set designer’s warning, I poked my head in on Saturday to see how things were going. There were miles and miles of cables and giant crates. Set pieces littered the auditorium in hundreds of pieces waiting to be reassembled. How they would get all of it rebuilt in two days was beyond me.
On Friday, we showed up and were whisked away to a recording studio, where we heard the orchestrations for the opening number. We recorded a modified version of the opening that we would perform the next Thursday at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. As if we weren’t stressing enough about getting the show opened in time, now we had to split rehearsal between the stage show and the televised number. My head was swimming in choreography because it was the same song, same choreography, but very different staging. I’ve done promotional songs for shows before, which were often different from what was performed on stage. But trying to learn both versions simultaneously was driving all of us crazy. Thankfully, the recording engineers spent all night on Friday working on the cut of the song for Macy’s, so we had the exact version we’d be lip-syncing to on Thursday.
The televised Broadway numbers shown during the parade are always lip-synced, as are all the performance numbers. Nothing is left to chance with the televised musical numbers at the parade.
Carissra, Kirk, Johnny, and I had pizza on Saturday night, and I explained the whole process to them.
