Jack & Louisa: Act 3

by Andrew Keenan-Bolger

  Lou took a seat, crossed her arms, and winked at me.

  “I’m in.”

  I had to cover my mouth so I wouldn’t squeal with joy (gym class had proven to be a good thing today, but I wasn’t about to press my luck).

  “But,” she added rigidly, “I want us to win.”

  “Oh . . . kay.”

  “Admit it: You’re just as sick as I am of hearing about how Teddy’s snooty school gets the trophy handed to them every year like they’re Audra-freaking-McDonald,” she said. “If I’m giving up Sound of Music, it’s not for a participation medal.”

  I nodded, slowly realizing that the obsession Lou normally reserved for perfecting our auditions may have just found a new outlet.

  “I already have a great idea for the show,” she said, flashing a grin. “What about The Fantasticks?”

  As soon as Lou said it, I knew it was the perfect choice. The Fantasticks was a jewel box of a musical that had been running for more than fifty years off-Broadway. It tells the story of Matt and Luisa, two next-door neighbors whose fathers have built a wall to keep them from ever seeing each other, but despite their parents’ warnings, the two fall madly in love. Meanwhile, the fathers are secretly best friends and have built the wall knowing that their children will, of course, disobey them.

  My mom and dad had taken me to see the The Fantasticks back when we lived in New York, and I’d fallen completely in love with it. The musical was simply staged on a shoestring budget, with almost no set—just a sheet, a trunk, and a few props—yet the show still felt magical. After eight shows a week performing in Mary Poppins, where nannies flew, statues came to life, and chimney sweeps tap-danced on the ceiling, I was amazed to see how much of a spectacle you could put on with just a handful of actors, a couple of pieces of fabric, and an irresistible melody.

  “So, Jack, what do you think?” Lou said, snapping me back to reality.

  “I . . . I think it’s a great idea!”

  “And don’t you think I’d make a great Luisa?” she said, batting her eyelids.

  “You don’t just want to do it because you’d get to play a character with the same name as you, right?” I joked.

  “Um, there’s a Louisa in Sound of Music, too,” Lou said. “My name is very prevalent in musical theater, Jack. And if I recall correctly, a certain someone was pretty desperate to nail his solo as Jack in Into the Woods . . .”

  “Fair enough,” I said, rolling my eyes. “All right, so we’re doing The Fantasticks.”

  Saying it out loud made me laugh a little bit. I wasn’t sure how in the world we were going to pull it off, but just speaking the words meant it had to be a little bit true.

  “So, where do we start?” I asked.

  “Oh.” Lou reached slyly into the pocket of her sweatpants and pulled out a little piece of paper. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  The next week felt like a spy movie with the two of us cast as secret agents assigned to Operation: Assemble Team Fantasticks. Once again, I came to realize how lucky I was to have a partner as capable as Lou. If Agent Goodrich was the one to hatch a plan, Agent Benning was the one to execute it. But producing a musical of our own would take more than just flyers, mass texts, and notes stuffed in lockers.

  “The first thing on our checklist,” Lou said, reading off the piece of paper I’d dubbed her Master Plan, “is ‘Get a Choreographer.’ I figure whoever we ask can also double as the Mute, since that character does the bulk of dancing in the show.”

  Jenny was the obvious choice, of course, but since her recent brush with professional dance over the summer, she’d become blasé about anything as juvenile as a middle-school theatrical production.

  “I’m already bored with eighth grade,” Jenny had groaned on our first day of school. “I wish we could just skip it and go right into high school.”

  She certainly looked ready for high school, not to mention that she’d begun dabbling in the world of eyeliner. Still, Lou wondered if choreographing a show might just be the pickup Jenny needed.

  We met her at her locker right as the final school bell rang.

  “Well, it depends,” Jenny said, tugging on her jacket. “Are you thinking the choreography would be in the Vaganova or Cecchetti method of ballet? I can do either, obvi, but it’d be good to know what you had in mind before I signed on.”

  “I was thinking more in the musical staging . . . method,” I said, squeezing the straps of my backpack. “We’re just doing a thirty-minute version, so there’s really not a ton of dancing, more just stylized movement.

  “Huh,” Jenny said, slamming her locker shut. “So Cecchetti is out.”

  “Probably.” Lou clenched her teeth. “But there’s a number where it rains, so maybe confetti is in.”

  Jenny nodded slowly, looking back and forth between Lou and me.

  “Well . . . even Martha Graham had to keep it simple now and then,” she said finally. “I’ll do it.”

  Next on Lou’s Master Plan: “Find an Adult Supervisor.”

  Of course there was only one choice. The theater gods must have been smiling on us, because when we arrived at music class the following morning we were greeted not by Mrs. Wagner, but by our old director Belinda Grier (dressed in a long-sleeve red leotard and skirt that could have easily been a repurposed Cassie costume from A Chorus Line).

  “Mrs. Wagner is out with the flu, poor thing,” Belinda announced to the class. “You’d think spending half a year in a body cast was bad enough, but hey, what do I know?” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Anyway, she didn’t leave me any lesson plans, so I guess I’ll just do what I do best—improvise!”

  For Belinda, “improvising” meant dishing stories about a nightmare summer-stock experience in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

  “And that’s why you should always get your agent to negotiate your housing,” she announced to the classroom. “Or you just might end up sleeping in a room decorated with a hundred antique dolls.”

  The second the bell rang, we hurried to her desk to tell her our decision.

  “I’m so glad you went with Ghostlight,” she said, taking a swig from her Broadway Dance Center water bottle. “I think this is going to be really good for you two.”

  “I think so, too,” I said, beaming.

  “I remember auditioning for Luisa right when I moved to New York,” Belinda said, staring off into the middle distance dreamily. “I lived off of egg noodles for a week so I could save up to buy this perfect little white lace dress for the audition.”

  “How did it go?” Lou asked.

  “Oh,” Belinda said, tossing the bottle into her bedazzled duffel bag. “I think my feedback was that I was too energetic. You know, it’s hard to contain all of this in a hundred-seat theater,” she said, drawing a big circle around her face with her finger. “I’m really more primed for a Broadway house, anyway.”

  We nodded in solemn agreement.

  “About that competition, though.” She smiled. “Of course I’ll be your supervisor.”

  “Next in the Master Plan,” Lou read from the list as we walked to science class, “is casting.”

  “Well, you’re obviously playing Luisa,” I said, pulling a pencil out of my pocket and scribbling her name next to the character. “But who do we get to play the other lead? Matt?”

  “Are you sure you can’t be it?” Lou whined.

  “Not if I’m going to direct.” I shrugged. “That’s the rule.”

  Plus, I was excited about the prospect of running the show. There were always going to be things for us to audition for, but how often did someone our age get to call the shots?

  As Lou and I rounded the corner back to our lockers, we passed the school’s impossibly huge trophy case. A framed picture of last year’s boys’ soccer team hung front and center, their bright red jerseys peeking from behind a row of gold-painted trophies. Lou practically screeched to a halt, her eyes trained on number 1.

  “I know what you’re thinking, L
ou,” I said, following her gaze. “But their season is about to go into full swing.”

  “No, I know,” she grumbled. “But how good would Sebastian Maroney be as Matt? Look at what he did with Sky Masterson.”

  “Yeah, he’d be perfect,” I admitted. “But he’s the captain of the team! They practice, like, every day. There’s no way he’d have time to rehearse.”

  “Fine,” Lou huffed. “Well, who were you thinking to play El Gallo, then?”

  El Gallo was the narrator of the show who gets hired by the two fathers to kidnap Luisa (another ploy to get Matt to heroically rescue her and fall even deeper in love). This needed to be a guy with a rich deep voice and the presence of someone older and mischievous.

  “What about William Kerrigan-Hyde?” Lou suggested.

  “Scrawny little William Kerrigan-Hyde who played Nicely-Nicely Johnson?”

  “Nooo,” Lou said, raising her eyebrows. “I mean big, tall William Kerrigan-Hyde whose voice changed and who went through a giant growth spurt over the summer. He used to be a high tenor, but now I bet he’d sound great singing a baritone standard like ‘Try to Remember.’”

  William’s eyes lit up in science class when we suggested having him play a character with a dark, mysterious side.

  “It sounds like a fun role. And if you’d like,” he said, running a finger across his upper lip, “I could even grow out my mustache.”

  We squinted, studying his face, but there only seemed to be a whisper of peach fuzz below his nose.

  “Sure.” Lou nodded. “If you think it would help.”

  “Oh, it would,” William, said nodding his head. “It definitely would.”

  “How are we going to find boys to play the fathers?” Lou asked, reading the next two roles off her checklist, Hucklebee and Bellomy.

  I was ready for this question. After our difficulty finding boys for Guys and Dolls, I knew we’d have to think outside the box to cast The Fantasticks. Most of the roles in the show were for male actors, and this time there wouldn’t be a soccer team with an off-season to swoop in and save the day.

  “What if they were mothers?” I suggested. “We’re supposed to write our own adaptation of the show. I don’t think it changes anything if they’re played by girls. In fact, we get judged on creativity, so it might even work in our favor.”

  “Look at you,” Lou teased. “You’re acting like a director already.”

  Esther Blick and Sarah Fineberg were our first and only asks. They played Agatha and General Cartwright from the Save-a-Soul Mission in Guys and Dolls. Both had natural comic timing and were eager to sink their teeth into leading roles, even if it meant playing characters three times their age.

  We didn’t even have to brainstorm actors to play Henry and Mortimer, the pair of old Shakespearean actors who assist El Gallo in the kidnapping scene, because Belinda delivered them right to our lunch table.

  “I’d like you to meet Raj and Radhika Jupti,” she said, placing her hands on the shoulders of two strikingly similar kids.

  “They’re seventh-graders who just transferred this year,” Belinda said. “Brother-and-sister twins all the way from jolly old England.”

  The boy had a messy pile of black hair, and the girl, two long plaited pigtails. Both wore identical smiles.

  “I had them in my morning class and we got to chatting,” Belinda continued. “You’ll never believe what show they performed in their boarding school last year.”

  Raj took a step forward, blushing slightly. “William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.”

  “We played Sebastian and Viola,” the girl said. “Naturally.”

  The last period of the day was study hour, and for the first time in a week I found myself alone, staring at the final entry on our checklist: the role of Matt.

  WHERE R U? I texted Lou, sneaking my phone out from its hiding place beneath the flap of my flannel shirt. SHE’S ABOUT TO TAKE ATTENDANCE AND UR STILL NOT HERE.

  “Abigail Abbott,” our librarian, Mrs. Westphal, called out.

  “Here!”

  “Zachary Avalon.”

  “Present!”

  “Louisa Benning,” Mrs. Westphal read.

  I stared at the entrance to the library. C’mon, Lou.

  “Louisa?” Mrs. Westphal looked around the room. “Is Louisa Benning here?”

  “I’m here!” shouted Lou, busting through the door, a crumpled sheet of paper held aloft triumphantly. She looked disheveled but delighted to be there.

  “Where were you?” I whispered as she collapsed into the chair next to me.

  “Just doing a little last-minute detective work,” she panted, sliding the mystery piece of paper across the table.

  I flipped it over and began reading what seemed to be a schedule filled in with dates and names.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s the entire practice and game schedule for the soccer team for the next two months,” Lou wheezed. “I stole it off of Coach Wilson’s desk.”

  “You did WHAT?!” I said, completely ignoring the “Silence Is Golden” poster on the wall to my left. I knew when Lou put her mind to something, she went all in, but I never presumed it would involve a rendezvous with crime.

  “Okay, not exactly,” Lou hushed me. “I sort of got Belinda to steal it and xerox me a copy, but it was totally my idea.”

  “What do you need this for?!”

  “Well, look,” Lou said, pointing to the calendar at the bottom of the page. “Notice anything missing?”

  I scanned the dates and numbers, but nothing seemed to be jumping out as very “clue-worthy.”

  “Not really. There’s practice every day of the week, just like we guessed,” I said, pushing it back across the table.

  “Right,” Lou said, “but on Tuesdays and Thursdays it’s only the girls’ soccer team that’s called for practice. Plus, on the weeks where they play a game at home, they get Sundays off.”

  I stared at the sheet again. “So what you’re saying is—”

  “—maybe there’s a way to convince Sebastian Maroney to rehearse with us on those days,” Lou said, finishing my thought.

  Like an actor being fed his cue line, a voice piped up from behind us.

  “What about Sebastian Maroney?”

  We spun around in our chairs to find the man of the hour standing above us carrying a stack of books, looking like a typical eighth-grade boy, not at all like the hero who’d shown up in the last ten minutes of our spy movie to possibly crack the case.

  “He-eyy, Sebastian,” Lou said, tilting her head. “Sooo, remember when you helped the soccer team win those big games last year?”

  “Yeah,” Sebastian replied. “We were district champs.”

  “Right, right.” Lou nodded. “Well, this year, how’dja like to win an even bigger trophy?”

  I’ll never forget walking into the Shaker Heights Middle School auditorium that first Sunday. I’d been to a lot of first rehearsals, and they always brought about the same fun rituals—highlighting lines in your script, announcing the role you’d be playing, feeling that rush when it was your first time speaking as a new character—but they were nothing compared to this. We were back in the auditorium where I’d spent so many hours rehearsing, but today I was wearing a different hat. I walked down the aisle and took my position at the front of the room, looking out at the cast we’d spent days assembling.

  In their faces I saw the afternoon we’d spent begging Principal Lang to make Team Ghostlight an official club so we could get school funding. I could still smell the printer toner from when Belinda ran off copies of the permissions slip she’d drawn up for us. I could hear my mom’s voice echoing through the living room as she went down the cast list, calling every parent to see if they could join her as a chaperone for the Ghostlight weekend. I saw the stacks of binders and punched holes of script pages scattered across my bedroom carpeting like snowflakes.

  “Good morning,” I said in a loud, clear voice. “Thank you so much for
joining us today to work on The Fantasticks—Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s classic musical.”

  I looked around the room at Lou and Sebastian, perched in the center, their scripts open and lines already highlighted. At Jenny by their side, armed with a pen and big pink binder with the words Dance Bible splashed across it. At William and Raj and Radhika, Sarah and Esther, all of them looking to me for answers and trusting that whatever decisions I’d make were for the sake of the show. I glanced over to Belinda, armed with a notepad and pen with a silver tinsel pom-pom on the end. She nodded for me to continue.

  “You know,” I said, “The Fantasticks is the longest-running show to have ever appeared in New York. Its first production off-Broadway ran for forty-two years. Unfortunately, we don’t have quite that much time,” I added. “Only eight weeks, so I guess we should dive right in and begin reading through the script.”

  I took a seat in the folding chair and opened my binder.

  “Skip the pages I crossed out. Those are cut for time. And, oh,” I said, another thought popping into my head. “I guess I should maybe read the stage directions.”

  “Oh no, honey,” Belinda piped up from her seat. “Let me. You shouldn’t have to do anything but listen and give it your full attention.” She smiled and gave me a wink. “You’re the director now.”

  And with that, I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. As she spoke, my brain began firing and flashing with images. All that worry that I’d mess things up or not have enough good ideas seemed to fall away, and the prospect of coming up with something new, something maybe even great was enough to let me know I was in the right place.

  “This play should be played on a platform,” she read. “There is no scenery, but occasionally a stick may be held up to represent a wall. Or a cardboard moon may be hung upon a pole to indicate that it is night.”

  Louisa

  TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR FIRST rehearsal I couldn’t believe how quickly the time was flying. Neither could my camp friends, who, upon learning that Jack and I had signed up for Ghostlight, had practically lost their minds with excitement and were now counting down the days until our reunion.