Jack & Louisa: Act 3

by Andrew Keenan-Bolger

  “Well, Big Jule was a non-singing role,” she said, “but he still had to sing in the group numbers and he always looked so cocky.”

  I slumped in my seat, the weight of our hasty decision sinking in. Tanner had already agreed to do the show. We couldn’t just take back the offer.

  “Breathe, Jack.” I felt a bangled hand rest on my shoulder. “It’s his first day,” Belinda spoke calmly into my ear. “I’m sure he’s just nervous.”

  Tanner Falzone, nervous? The biggest, brashest soccer star of the eighth grade, nervous? I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought.

  “He’s just ‘in his head’ right now,” Belinda whispered. “He’s feeling vulnerable. He needs someone to talk him off the ledge.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” I pouted. “You want to talk about ‘nervous’? That’s exactly what I feel every time I see him walking toward me in the hallway.”

  I watched Belinda look over to Lou and then up to the stage where Tanner was choking his way through the final chorus. I shrunk even deeper into the chair, my hands clasped on the side of my head in defeat.

  “Jack,” I felt Belinda’s voice whisper in my ear. I looked up to see her peering at me with kind eyes. “I know you’re the director,” she said in a low voice, “and I don’t want to overstep, but if you’d like,” she proceeded cautiously, “maybe . . . I could help.”

  Lou’s eyes flashed over to me. It was an understatement to say that Belinda and I used to have a complicated relationship. Luckily, it wasn’t the case anymore, and as I watched Tanner sweat under the auditorium lights, I knew I could use an extra hand.

  “If you think you can help”—I turned to Belinda—“then go for it. I trust you.”

  She smiled reassuringly and nodded.

  “Try to remember, and if you remember, then follow,” Tanner’s voice creaked, arriving mercifully at the end of the song. He smiled uncertainly out into the audience.

  “That was great, Tanner,” Belinda called from the audience. “Jack here has to fill out some forms for the competition. You just wouldn’t believe the hoops they make you jump through!” she said, eyeing me in her periphery and slipping me her silver pom-pom pen. “So he’s asked me to work with you for a little bit.”

  “Yeah, that was great, Tanner,” I said, picking up her cue and grabbing the pen. “I gotta take care of these ASAP, so if you don’t mind working with your old director, I’ll be with you in just a minute.”

  I began fake-scribbling notes in the margins of my script. (It was easier said than done. Her outrageously embellished writing utensil was so top-heavy, it nearly fell out of my hand. How was she able to write with this thing?)

  “Uh, okay.” Tanner shrugged, wrinkling his forehead.

  “So,” Belinda said, sitting up in her chair. “I’ve got a question for you: Why are you singing this song?”

  Tanner stared back at her blankly. “Uhh,” he grumbled. “To tell people that it’s . . . September?”

  A couple of giggles emerged from the cast. I looked up skeptically from my fake form-filling-out at Belinda, but she looked anything but ready to throw in the towel.

  “That’s right.” She nodded. “You’re the narrator. You’re setting the scene. You’re bringing us into the world of The Fantasticks.”

  “Oh.” Tanner nodded. “Right.”

  My pen stopped its writing. I began to lean in.

  “What if we did a little exercise?” Belinda said. “Kind of like . . . Oh, what does Coach call them in soccer?” she asked, squinting her eyes. “Oh, right! A drill!”

  “Um, okay,” he said, scratching the back of his neck.

  “Yeah, let’s sing the song again,” Belinda called from the audience. “But this time, let’s forget about the music. Instead, I just want you to speak the lyrics.”

  “Just, like, talk them?”

  “Precisely.” She nodded, her thick red curls bobbing in agreement. “I want you to use them to describe the setting. Help us envision the countryside. What does it look like? Are the leaves on the trees green or just beginning to turn orange? What does it smell like? Don’t worry about placement or breathing or any of that extra stuff.” She swatted the air with her manicured hands. “I’m still going to have Frank play the music under you, but all I want you to do is just talk to us.”

  “Just talk to you,” he repeated. “Okay.” He shrugged reluctantly. “If you say so.”

  “Go ahead, Frank.” Belinda nodded to Mr. Hennessy, who in turn began plinking the dreamy intro to the opening number.

  “Try to remember,” Tanner spoke in a monotone voice, “the kind of September when life was slow . . .”

  He sounded completely unenthused, like a robot reading words on a computer screen.

  “. . . And oh, so mellow.”

  “What do you see?” Belinda shouted from the audience, clasping her fists together.

  “Try to remember,” he said, rolling his neck and straightening his back, “the kind of September when grass was green.”

  As Tanner continued to speak, more and more you could detect slight changes. His body seemed to loosen up. His focus began to settle. His lyrics were becoming clearer. As Mr. Hennessy started to play the second verse, Belinda shouted out another prompt to Tanner:

  “Imagine you’re talking to just one person.”

  This time as he began to speak, a twinkle appeared in his eye. His words painted images of willows and yellow grain and dreams that are “kept beside your pillow.” I couldn’t know for sure who he’d chosen to picture, but whoever it was, he was certainly connecting with them. I watched out of the corner of my eye as Lou leaned forward in her seat, resting her chin in her hand.

  And as the final verse commenced, the one about hollow hearts and winter snow, I noticed something else, too—even though Tanner wasn’t trying to, his speaking voice (which was naturally so big and resonant) began slowly matching the tune being played beneath him.

  “Wouldja look at that,” I murmured in a low voice.

  “Deep in December, our hearts should remember and follow.”

  Mr. Hennessy’s piano faded with the final plink of a cutoff, leaving Tanner staring out into the auditorium, eyes wide, watching perhaps as invisible snow fell from the rafters, covering the audience in a cold white dust. It was magnificent.

  I leaned over and whispered two words into Belinda’s ear.

  “Thank you.”

  She threw me a wink. “Ah, it was nothing, darlin’.”

  From that moment on, things began zipping along brilliantly. Rehearsals exploded with new life. Tanner had shaken off his early nerves, and I was directing with a newfound confidence. Our cast began owning their characters, and Belinda was at my side every step of the way, lending an ear whenever I needed to bounce around a new idea. The best part of it all was that everyone seemed genuinely happy to be there.

  My proudest moment came at the end of the school week, as we rehearsed one of the sweetest numbers from the show, “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.” I’d decided to stage it modestly, with Sebastian and Lou crouched on the floor and Jenny above them holding a tree branch. It was clearly Lou and Sebastian’s favorite song to sing, and their voices blended perfectly in it. In the final verse, as the characters Matt and Luisa surrendered to the idea of being caught in the storm, I had Jenny reach into her pouch and sprinkle them with tiny blue pieces of paper “rain.” It was a simple bit of stagecraft, but paired with the haunting piano accompaniment and beautiful voices, it made me remember the quiet simplicity that drew me to the show in the first place.

  I returned home that evening triumphant, marching up the stairs like I was at Radio City, about to accept a Tony Award.

  WANNA FACETIME? I texted Teddy (another activity I’d grown accustomed to).

  OF COURSE! he responded.

  “How’s the show going?” I said into the camera, launching immediately into the world of Ghostlight. “What’s it like being the lead this time around?”

 
“Aw, it’s so cool!” He beamed. “Wren has really come up with some great stuff. I knew she was smart, but this is next level.”

  “That’s awesome! What sort of stuff is she doing?” I asked, feeling my curiosity creep in. I wondered if other directors had felt the same kind of breakthrough.

  “Well, Cavendish is sort of known at Ghostlight for reinterpreting the classics, so Wren has had to think completely outside the box. Remember how I told you that her dad’s a director?”

  “Yeah, at Steppenwolf?”

  “Exactly,” he continued. “Well, what I didn’t know was that her mom is, like, an inventor. For phone apps, or something. You know that game Bubble-opolis?”

  “Yeah, I love that game.”

  “Her mom invented that!” he cheered. “So she’s taken both her dad’s influence and her mom’s world and kind of made How to Succeed about that. She has it set in modern-day Wicker Park, which is this totally hipster neighborhood in Chicago, and instead of it taking place in a 1960s office building, she’s made it like we’re all working at a new tech start-up. So instead of secretaries, people are app developers, and instead of coffee, everyone’s drinking Red Bull.”

  “Wow,” I said, feeling a little flustered. “That’s a really cool idea.”

  “Oh, and you know how my character starts out stuck in the mail room, right?”

  “Yeah, totally,” I replied. “That ‘Company Way’ song.”

  “Right, right,” he cut in. “Well, in this version, I’m stuck running the company’s Twitter account.”

  “That’s hilarious!” I said, meaning it, but simultaneously feeling a twinge of jealousy sneak into my voice.

  “Yeah, we’ve only had, like, twenty rehearsals, but already I can tell it’s going to be amazing. Like, How to Succeed is a great show, but she’s making it really mean something to today’s audience.”

  I could tell he was recycling sound bites, no doubt that had been drilled into the cast by this blue-haired Wren character.

  “And she’s thinking really big picture, too,” he continued. “She’s doing this big commentary on social media and digital marketing and, oh, what was it?” he said, squinting his eyes. “Oh right, something called tech dependency.”

  I sank into my pillow. I thought back to our rehearsals and the confidence I’d had just one hour ago. The excitement I’d felt when someone sang on pitch or didn’t fall on their face doing one of Jenny’s dances, it all began to feel stupid in comparison. I hadn’t come up with any kind of concept or even realized there was more than one way to do The Fantasticks. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that all I was really doing as a director was reading stage directions and translating them into blocking. Suddenly our show I’d imagined sweeping the competition was looking a lot more like something else—a big fat failure.

  “How’s your show going?” Teddy asked, smiling broadly on the screen.

  “Oh,” I sat up, trying to dash the look of concern from my face. “It’s going really well, too. You know, just working on the material, figuring out the moments.”

  I’d planned on telling him about the mothers’ slapstick duet and my concept for “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” but after hearing about Cavendish’s edgy, techno musical, was he really going to be impressed with paper confetti?

  “That’s so great!” Teddy nodded. “I bet you’re, like, the most fun director in the world.”

  I forced out a smile. “Thanks.”

  “Ugh,” Teddy groaned. “Well, I should go. My parents are dragging me to a gallery opening, and I need to put on a suit.”

  “You in a suit? That, I gotta see,” I said, trying to cover the weird feeling I was suddenly having. “Send pics or it didn’t happen.”

  “Will do!” He laughed. “Wait till you see this hideous tux. I look like a scrawny penguin. See ya, Jack!”

  I frowned as Teddy’s face disappeared from the screen. Normally when I got off the phone with him I felt giddy, like I was a better, more comfortable version of myself. But right now I felt the opposite. I felt like a little kid. I’d been stupid to think that we could topple Cavendish’s winning streak the very first time at bat, especially when my good ideas consisted of getting people to sing their lines loud enough so we could hear them, not even thinking about a “big picture.”

  I started fearing the worst. What if we showed up at Ghostlight with a piece that looked like it was just thrown together by a bunch of kids? What if I’d dragged Lou into a crummy project when she’d lined up a potentially great one with the Shaker Heights Players? What if Teddy, who seemed so excited to see what I would do as a director, came to realize that I really wasn’t special after all?

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do; I just knew that I needed to talk to someone. I picked up my phone and dialed Lou’s number.

  “Hey,” I said. “Could you come over? I think we’re doing everything wrong.”

  Louisa

  I HURRIED OVER TO JACK'S house, thoroughly perplexed. Doing everything wrong? How was that possible? Today we’d had one of our best rehearsals yet; Jack had staged “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” so beautifully that when Jenny started to sprinkle the “rain” above our heads, I caught Belinda wiping tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her Cats sweatshirt. And trust me—Belinda Grier wasn’t much for crying. I racked my brain as I approached the Goodriches’ front stoop, trying to guess what could have happened over the last two hours that would cause Jack to feel like we were “doing everything wrong” and coming up with nothing. I only had to knock once before Jack swung open the door, anxiously awaiting my arrival.

  “Come on in,” he ordered, then led me upstairs to his room and shut the door, visibly agitated.

  “I don’t think we have a chance at winning,” he said with deep concern. “Not with the show we’ve got right now.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked defensively. “Everyone’s doing such a great job.”

  “Everyone is doing a great job,” Jack assured me. “You guys are awesome. But you guys are not the problem—I am.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was just FaceTiming with Teddy,” he said, pacing restlessly around his room. Normally a reference to Teddy would send me into fits of speculation about Jack’s love life, but I could tell by his behavior that whatever was bothering him in this moment had little to do with romance.

  “They’re way ahead of us in terms of creativity,” he continued, shaking his head. “Their director—”

  “Who—Bird?”

  “Wren,” he corrected. “She has all these cool ideas about how to make the show ‘current.’”

  “Current?”

  Talking a mile a minute, Jack went on to describe all the things Wren was doing to make her presentation of How to Succeed . . . stand out, like setting the show at a tech start-up company in some park with wicker where everyone drinks Red Bull all day.

  “I mean, I’m not doing anything like that!” Jack cried, grabbing his Fantasticks script off his desk. “I’m just following the stage directions!” He thumbed through the pages in disgust.

  “Hey—you are not ‘just following the stage directions,’” I said, thinking of all the ways Jack had impressed me over the last couple of weeks, like how he’d gotten Raj and Radhika to embrace their inner clowns, and how he’d been so collaborative with Jenny, and how patient he’d been with Tanner as he helped him become a leading man. Mostly, though, I was impressed by what a great leader he’d become, always willing to listen to us but also always knowing what he wanted to do. Unfortunately, that confidence had vanished.

  “Well,” Jack scoffed, “I’m definitely not being as creative as Cavendish.”

  “Do you think the other schools are trying to be as creative as Cavendish?” I asked. “I mean, it doesn’t say anywhere in the Ghostlight guidelines that you have to do something weird with your show, or—what did you say Teddy’s school was making? A ‘commentary’?”

  I’d alway
s thought that kind of thing only happened in experimental theater, where Shakespeare plays were set in grocery stores, or audience members had to wear masks. I didn’t know that it also happened in middle-school musical theater competitions.

  “No, I don’t think the other schools are doing anything like that, either, which is the problem,” Jack said emphatically. “If Cavendish is the only school that’s daring to be different, then of course they’re going to win again. All the other shows will seem totally boring.”

  I knew Jack was talking about his own direction, but I still couldn’t help feeling a little stung by the suggestion that our presentation was one big snooze-fest.

  “What about turning the characters of the fathers into mothers? That’s different,” I offered, only to have Jack shake his head in dismissal.

  “Not different enough. You should have heard Teddy. Everyone’s going to be wearing Bluetooth headsets.”

  I was starting to feel as agitated as Jack, which must have showed, because he stopped pacing for a moment and looked at me in earnest.

  “The thing is, Lou, if we were doing a school play, we’d be in great shape. But we’re not—we’re preparing for a competition. And you said yourself that you weren’t going to give up Sound of Music unless we beat Cavendish.”

  That was true. I’d recently learned that Bridget Livak had won the role of Brigitta in Sound of Music (why were we all playing characters with our own names?), and while I was genuinely glad that I’d chosen to do The Fantasticks instead, I was still a little uncertain about my decision when I thought about the fun Bridget must be having with the Shaker Heights Players. As much as I hated to admit it, my main consolation prize was imagining a glorious victory over Cavendish. Picturing Jack and myself lifting a trophy above our heads, my agitation gave way to a sudden determination.

  “Okay, then fine,” I said. “Let’s come up with our own concept.”

  “You mean start over?” Jack asked, clearly overwhelmed. “But if we’re going to change our presentation, we have to do it, like, right now.”