Attack of the Theater People (20 page)

“Hi! I’m here to see Clark Sterling.”

He laughs, revealing a gold tooth. “Yeah, you and about ten others.”

I must appear as confused as I feel, because he says, “There’s nobody here by that name.”

“But…”

“Look in the envelope.”

Twenty-nine

Thoughts rattle around my brain
like sneakers in a dryer:
How did he know about the envelope? What’s going on? Oh, my God, I just emptied my bank account to a total stranger.
My hands trembling, I pull open the envelope and find a half dozen quarters. The crazy guy must have switched them on me. Except he wasn’t crazy. He’s a con artist. An actor. If I weren’t so hosed, I’d appreciate the verisimilitude of his performance.

I stagger down the street, my brain in a fog. A hundred bucks, gone. Plus cab fare, which is just cruel. I mean, he’d already gotten my money. Why did he and his cronies have to stick me with cab fare, too? How could someone be so vicious? At least my own brand of swindling is a victimless crime. (Okay, I did dine and dash. But that was an honest dishonest mistake.) I mean, when Natie and I bought Pharmicare options, no one got hurt, right?

Right?

As I once again trudge across town, cursing the malevolent syndicate that preys upon trusting innocents like myself, nagging doubts about my own innocence start to nip at my heels. Is it possible that whomever we bought the options from had to hold on to the shares until the options expired? In which case, they couldn’t dump the stock when it plummeted. If someone owned Pharmicare at $30 a share and committed to selling it to me at $35 a share, but it went down to $10, that meant they lost, let me see, 750 shares times twenty equals,…$15,000? Did I do that?

I don’t want to know.

The pressure
—both in my sinuses and my life—finally gets to me and I sink into a Nyquil-induced coma for a few days. Natie periodically hydrates me with herbal teas, mixing Sweet Apple Chamomile with Sleepytime for sweet dreams. He and Willow offer to make up the difference on the rent while stalling on the utilities by sending the phone company the check for the electric bill and vice versa. I do my best to ignore the February thirteenth deadline from the SEC, praying that Reagan’s pledge to reduce the size of government means the office is understaffed.

This cold must be going around, as I start getting calls to substitute usher. Of course I take them, infecting the old ladies and guaranteeing job security for me and Natie, who takes the gigs so he can pay back Paula. Maybe it’s the head cold, but what I see onstage depresses the hell out of me. There are only fourteen shows playing, most of them ranging from at-least-it-didn’t-suck disappointing to what’s-that-smell awful. The lone bright spot is John Guare’s
House of Blue Leaves,
which has a monologue that would be perfect for my reaudition to Juilliard. That is, assuming I don’t go to jail. For several nights in a row I fidget in the back of the theater, restraining myself from leaping onto the stage because the actor playing the role is totally underplaying it, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. I mean, the character is plotting to blow up the pope because his father doesn’t pay attention to him. He’s so crazy he gets mistaken for retarded. I would make a meal out of that role. I’m sure the only reason this Ben Stiller got the part is because he’s Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara’s son. It’s obvious he’ll never amount to anything.

Even more dispiriting are the audiences. Up until now, I never really noticed who goes to Broadway shows. I guess I was too wrapped up in my excitement at what was happening onstage to look. But as I meet the Bridge and Tunnel crowd face-to-face, I discover that a disturbing number of them are the kind of people who, when asked about the show, will tell you about their seats. The middle-class New Jerseyites I was rebelling against when I decided to become an actor are the very ones I’m going to have to entertain. Suddenly my dream of glittering Broadway stardom doesn’t shine quite as much.

Disillusionment! The Musical.

The dream dims even more when an usher at the Gershwin gets pneumonia, resulting in my first long-term temp assignment. When I tell Kelly I’m going to be ushering
Starlight Express
, which goes into previews next week, she says, “That’s great! It’ll be like we’re working together.”

Sure.
At this performance, the role of the bitter spectator will be played by Edward Zanni.

As a swing, Kelly doesn’t perform at the first preview, so she’s waiting for me in the lobby after the show. As I descend the escalator (the Gershwin being one of those newer theaters that feels like a hotel) she smiles and gives a Miss America wave, not in a too-many-teeth Miss Texas way, but as if she were from some low-key, likable state, like Kansas or Vermont. She wears her new
Starlight Express
satin show jacket, which is the Broadway equivalent of the varsity letterman jacket, announcing to the world that she’s one of the cool kids.

A more evolved person than I would marvel at it, asking her to model it, then jumping up and down, screaming, “Look! You made it!”

So that’s what I do, summoning every acting skill I have to simulate euphoric delight. By way of contrast, I’m clad all in black, so I can blend in. That’s my job. To be blendinable. Blendinadvertent. Blendinadequate.

“So?” she says, as blithe and untroubled as spring. “Whadja think?”

What did I think?

To call
Starlight Express
garbage is an insult to sanitation workers. A noisy, epilepsy-inducing assault on the senses, it is the Chuck E. Cheese of musicals, a show so astonishingly vapid it makes
Cats
look like
A Lion in Winter
.

I know it shouldn’t bother me so much. I mean, it’s only a musical, right? But the show inflames me with rage. I feel soiled by it. Abused. Cheated. I want to hand out flyers that say,
Warning: This performance contains material that may insult your intelligence.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to light entertainment:
Guys and Dolls; Little Shop of Horrors
;
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
—these are frothy diversions that at least have a satiric edge to them, shows that entertain without condescending. But the Greeks did not invent theater so we could spend sixty bucks to watch
The Little Engine That Could
. They invented it so we could have an emotional catharsis. And the only emotion I feel at
Starlight Express
is the desire to flip the circuit breakers and send everyone home.

What did I
think
?

“It’s astonishing,” I say.

“Really?” Kelly says. “You’re not just saying that?”

Of course I’m just saying that. Don’t push your luck.

“No, no, no,” I say, gauging her reaction for signs of irony. “I just can’t wait to see you do it.”

“Wow,” she says. “I really thought you’d hate it. C’mon, I’ll show you the set.”

She links her arm through mine and I see she has a wrist brace, on which is scrawled,
Kell on Wheels
,
Kell-raiser
, and Cats
is for pussies.

“What happened?”

“You should see the girl I ran into,” she says. “She got ten stitches. Now we have our own unit at St. Clare’s on standby.”

This isn’t theater
, I think;
it’s vehicular homicide
.

Kelly leads me through a door to backstage, which, I have to admit, makes me feel pretty cool.

Of course, it’s not like I haven’t been backstage at a Broadway show before. I know this makes me sound like a colossal dork, but back in high school we used to wait at the stage door for autographs. Sometimes, if there were just a few of us, we’d get invited backstage. But that was as a fan, an outsider. This time it’s as a friend.

Being a newer building, the Gershwin has none of the dusty romance that its name implies. It’s just concrete hallways with fluorescent lights. Still, there’s an electric vibe in the air, and the cast is pumped with the excitement of the first preview. Seeing them up close—makeup streaked, costumes half-off to reveal sweaty T-shirts, heads encased in wig caps—gives me an ineffable thrill.

As much fun as backstage is, with its giddy dancer banter, I feel the stage itself calling to me like sonar. I’m relieved and excited when Kelly finally leads me into the wings.

Wings are appropriately named because they’re the part of the theater that allows the play to take flight. Dizzyingly tall as a Gothic cathedral, they have a hushed mystery to them, and I feel compelled to lower my voice even though the show is over. The wings are my favorite place to watch from, because you can see what’s happening on-and offstage at the same time. It’s like being able to watch the whole world at once, one part brightly lit, the other in shadow. I imagine this is how astronauts feel. Or people who die and come back.

As we hover in the wings, Kelly points out the components of the three-story set, which looks like a discotheque for androids. With a budget of $8 milion,
Starlight
is the most expensive musical ever mounted on Broadway, and it looks it. Three steel bridges connect stage right and stage left: “Kong,” which hangs overhead like a chandelier and can tilt, fly, rotate, and do everything but wash the costumes; the “Teeter-Totter,” which allows the cast to skate uphill from the stage to either side of the second level (and down again), depending on whether it’s teetering or tottering; and the unimaginatively named “Front-of-House Bridge,” which looms thirty feet up, parallel to the proscenium. Each bridge comes equipped with hydraulic gates that lower like guillotines to prevent the actors from flying off into space, which has already happened once. “This shit’s dangerous,” Kelly says. “It’s like skating on a building while it’s being built.”

As much as I hate the show and everything it represents, I can’t help but admire the actors. The sheer athletic achievement of racing up and down ramps and movable bridges thirty feet in the air at thirty miles an hour—plus doing flips on roller skates—is nothing short of remarkable. It gives new meaning to the word
training
.

As Kelly plays tour guide—over a hundred thousand pounds of steel, fifty miles of cable, blah, blah, blah—I can’t resist the magnetic pull of the stage. Without asking, I step out of the wings, inching down a sloping bowl that leads to the stage floor.

Behind me, Kelly says, “Edward, I don’t think you should…”

I don’t care about
should
. Not anymore.

The auditorium looks cavernous, nearly two thousand empty seats. I walk downstage, where ramps circle the first ten rows, and stare out at the house. From where I stand, my post in the rear mezzanine looks microscopic, a light-year away, and I ache at the thought of my irrelevance. This is where I belong, down here. Center stage.

It feels like home.

But each night I return to a balcony so high up you could probably see Jersey on a clear day. That first week Kelly goes on for two previews, each time as an electrical component, whatever that is. I’m excited for her, but, to be honest, I can’t tell which one she is. Between the cartoon costumes and amplification so artificial they might as well be lip-synching, they could switch actors two or three times a night and no one would know the difference.

After seething in the dark for a week, I finally figure out why the show makes me so angry. When I go to a musical I am looking to be more than entertained. I am seeking a transformative experience, a transcendental one. There’s something about that Broadway sound—the swell of the orchestra as the King thrusts his arm around Mrs. Anna, the entire chorus telling Mame she’s just sensational—that sends a shiver across my cheeks and down my neck, making the hair on my arms stand on end. The most stirring moments in symphonies or operas and the pulsing beat of rock and gospel may thrill me, but only musicals chill me.
Starlight Express
, on the other hand, leaves me cold. The only moment that comes close is when Rusty gets religion and sings, “I am the starlight,” but even that feels like the musical equivalent of a Hallmark card.

Audiences eat it up with a spoon.

Unless Kelly’s on, I hang out in the mezzanine lobby with my ushering partner, Mrs. Fiamma, a gray, wheezing smokestack of a woman who reminds me of Dustin, the roly-poly hopper car in the show, particularly because she has her Ash Wednesday ashes on her forehead when we meet. She doesn’t do anything during the performance—neither reads nor does crossword puzzles nor knits—she just sits there like a barnacle.

“Whatcha readin’?” she croaks. She’s got a voice like a shovel being dragged across a driveway.

“
Act One
, by Moss Hart.” I found it on Eddie’s bookshelf. It’s a memoir by the playwright of
You Can’t Take It with You
and
The Man Who Came to Dinner
. I dove into it to escape from my worries and haven’t come up for air since. Like a toddler who covers his eyes so no one will see him, I’m hoping if I forget about the SEC, they’ll forget about me and the fact that I ignored their deadline. “Have you read it?”

She shrugs. “He directed
My Fair Lady
, right?”

“I think so.”

“I met him.”

I blink. “You did?” This feels inconceivable to me, as if Broadway’s Golden Age were the Bronze Age. Moss Hart isn’t someone you meet.

She fans herself with a
Playbill
. “Back in the fifties I worked the Mark Hellinger. I musta seen
My Fair Lady
a thousand times.”

I put the book down, ravenous to devour the real thing. “What was it like?”

“Well, the Hellinger was a nothin’ house,” she says, warming to the tale. “One flop after another.
Ankles Aweigh
,
The Girl in Pink Tights
. Real dogs. There was that musical about the Amish, what was it called? It had what’s-her-name, Barbara Cook, but she wasn’t really Barbara Cook yet. Anyway, there I am, with the flops, while my girlfriend Maxine is at the St. James workin’
The King and I
and
Pajama Game
back-to-back. In those days, when you had a hit, everybody came to see it and the show was all over
Life
magazine and Rosemary Clooney’s singin’ ‘Hey There’ on the radio. It was so different back then. And they dressed up, too. Furs and diamonds. Not like today, with these tourists and their hairy legs. Now they show up lookin’ like they’re gonna wash a car. Anyways, I’d been an usher since the war. Ya’ think I woulda gotten a decent house by then, but I always hadda mouth on me. So there I am at the Hellinger, thinkin’, ‘A musical based on Shaw? It’ll last a month, but feel like a year.’ Which goes to show ya’ how much I know. Opening night, there’s the director, Mr. Hart, wearin’ out the carpet in the back of the theater, pacin’ back and forth, and I’m at my station, watchin’ the show, and thinkin’, ‘This is pretty good.’ But the audience is kinda polite, and Mr. Hart is so nervous he actually walks out of the theater with Mr. Lerner and Mr. Loewe. Just walks out.”