by Robin Talley
“I sense a techie watching us!” Andrew calls. “Or a vampire. I can never remember how to tell the difference!”
I raise my eyebrows at Dom. “Tell me again why you want to be one of them?”
“Hello, everyone!” Ms. Marcus calls from the wing. That’s enough to make me forget all about the actors.
The musical! They’re about to announce the musical!
Dom and I trade glances. Seconds later we’re racing out of the booth and down the steps. He beats me—longer legs—and I’m panting when I reach the stage.
It’s crammed full. The actors take up most of the space, as usual, and a thick cluster of them have gathered upstage right, already buzzing with excited whispers. The crew’s hanging on the periphery, but a quick glance at their faces makes it obvious that my friends are even more excited than the cast.
Musicals are a big deal at our school. At least, for everyone who doesn’t care about baseball season.
And even if I don’t get to be SM again—even if I’ve got a stupid love curse hanging over my head—there’s no denying it. I can’t wait to get started.
A Brief History of BHS Theater Superstitions—Spring Musicals Edition
Stored on BHS performing arts department shared drive
Created by: Riley Feldmann, stage manager, class of 2008
Viewable to: All cast, crew, and directors
Editable by: Current SM ONLY
In the wake of last year’s disastrous performance of the Scottish Play, the Beaconville High School stage manager is hereby responsible for tracking, and enforcing, all superstitions during the rehearsal and performance period for any and all shows, from auditions through strike. All offenses must be dealt with via immediate performance of a countercurse, also to be enforced by the SM.
Newly established superstitions must be added to the list below and preserved for posterity’s sake.
Also see the related doc “A Brief History of BHS Theater Superstitions—Fall Plays Edition.”
Show
Superstition
Cinderella (2008)
All cast members must walk out of the dressing room backward when returning from intermission (matinees excepted).
Shrek (2009)
Anyone caught kissing in the black box must shout “Sorry for the PDA!” up to the rafters.1
Little Shop of Horrors (2010)
DO NOT TOUCH THE PUPPET AFTER DARK WE REALLY THINK IT MIGHT TRY TO EAT YOU THIS IS NOT A JOKE.
West Side Story (2011)
Immediately before the house doors open on each performance night, Colleen McCormick (ASM) must stand center stage and shout “Buttheads!” as loudly as possible.
Beauty and the Beast (2012)
Bill Jusino (sound crew head) must say “pug snout” to the portrait of Abigail Adams in the hall before every rehearsal.2
Once Upon a Mattress (2013)
All male principals must chant in unison before each rehearsal, “I recognize the textual and subtextual misogyny in this musical and I promise to always strive to do better in my life than these jackass characters.” Members of the ensemble and crew, as well as non-males in any of the above groups, are welcome to join them.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (2014)
The first actor to make the audience laugh in each performance is given an extra flower at the end of the show.3
The Little Mermaid (2015)
All run crew members must wear glitter eye shadow at all times. (This superstition is irrelevant of gender. Mermaids are WAY beyond the binary.)
Sunday in the Park with George (2016)
No one can say the word forget onstage or in the choir room unless reciting it as a line in the script (forgot is allowed, though).
Legally Blonde (2017)
All cast members with naturally blond hair must apologize to the SM during tech for said blondness.
Fiddler on the Roof (2018)
Aquafina bottles are banned from all backstage areas. (Other water brands are technically allowed but we advise taking this as an opportunity to switch to reusable bottles anyway. Climate change is real, people!)
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (2019)
Julio Ramirez (actor) isn’t allowed to fist-bump anyone.4
Les Misérables (2020)
Melody McIntyre (SM) must not fall in love.
Scene 4—The McIntyre-Perez Living Room
DAYS UNTIL SPRING MUSICAL OPENS: 164
Oh my God. Oh my God.
My heart’s racing so fast I can’t stand still.
“Mel? Are you feeling all right?” Gabby hovers tentatively in the doorway. I gave her a ride back to my house since she lives in the next neighborhood over and her parents are both working late. We’ve done that a few times when we had a rehearsal run long. Her family just moved here and they’re still paranoid about crime rates in the “big city,” even though Beaconville is very much a suburb.
“I feel fantastic,” I tell her just as Pops sticks his head in from the kitchen.
“She’s home!” he calls around the corner. “And Gabby’s here too!”
“Hi, Mr. Perez,” Gabby says in her most polite voice. “Hi, Mr. McIntyre.”
“Hello to you both!” Dad comes out of his office, brushing off his jeans. He owns a contracting company and wears jeans every day, but he’s weirdly fastidious about them. “Gabby, it’s so nice to see you again. And please, call us Sean and Charlie. More importantly, congrats on the show, we saw it every night and—”
“Dad, Pops, you won’t believe what the musical is.” I’m still bouncing on my toes. “Guess. Come on, guess.”
“Ooh, do you think it’s Rent?” Pops asks Dad in a stage whisper.
“Mayyyybe,” Dad stage-whispers back. “Remember how that used to be her favorite show?”
“Remember how she sang it in her crib during naptime?”
“She did?” Gabby smiles. “Which songs?”
“‘Take Me or Leave Me,’ mostly,” Pops says. “She liked it because it has the word baby in it.”
“I forgot about that.” Dad snaps his fingers and catches Pops’s eye. “She cried unless we played the soundtrack every night during dinner, remember?”
“No, you two.” I glance at Gabby. “Please don’t be cheesy right now.”
But Pops is already snapping his fingers, too.
The next thing I know, they’re singing. Dad takes Maureen’s part and Pops takes Joanne’s, and they’re trying to outdo each other on the high notes.
My parents are so embarrassing.
To make things even worse, Gabby’s laughing. She joins in when they get to the chorus, singing along, except she won’t say damn (Gabby doesn’t believe in cursing) so she changes it to dang, and now I’m laughing too, which just isn’t fair. They shouldn’t make me laugh at a time like this. I haven’t even told them what the musical is yet!
“All right.” Pops finally switches to normal speech. “We should probably stop torturing Mel or she’ll never let us talk to her about those colleges.”
“You could have also never started torturing me in the first place,” I point out.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Dad grins. “So, what’s the musical?”
I geared up the video on my phone before I got out of the car so I’d be prepared for this moment. I clear my throat and, when both my parents are standing at attention, I hit play.
The music surges out. “Dun DUN!!!! BAH-pah-bah!”
They both recognize the opening notes to the overture right away and start to laugh. Gabby pretends to conduct the orchestra, sweeping her hands out dramatically with every note, and I seriously consider doing an interpretive dance but decide against it.
“Les Mis!” Dad grins. “Will must have finally given in.”
“Or Ms. Marcus overruled him.” Pops starts air drumming along as the music builds, clashing his pretend cymbals. My dads are the heads of the performing arts department parent committee, but they
were already friends with Will before I was born. That’s why I call him by his first name. He used to babysit me, and even now that he’s been my teacher for two and a half years, it still feels wrong to call him “Mr. Green.” He comes over and makes dinner for us all a few times a month, which is good because he’s a much better cook than either of my dads.
“Ooh, you know who should play Éponine?” Dad says to Pops, totally ignoring the degree to which I’m about to burst into pieces from delight. We’re only about to put on the greatest musical of all time, and I’m not getting over that thrill anytime soon. “Odile Rose.”
“You think her schedule will allow it?” Pops raises his eyebrows. “One of the parents in the Facebook group said she might have to miss graduation if she gets that movie role.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Dad says. “Especially after she already had to miss doing the fall play her senior year.”
“Dad, Pops, please stop obsessing,” I say, but they aren’t even looking at me. “We didn’t need her in R&J. Christina did fine.”
Odile’s schedule is so weird, the joke is that she just happens to go to school with us here in Massachusetts for part of the year. Her parents set up some kind of special arrangement with the district where she’s allowed to miss school for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. And if the rumors that circulated during the last week of rehearsal are correct, she’s also being considered for a role in a Martin Scorsese movie. It makes most of us on the crew roll our eyes, but the truth is Odile’s going to walk every red carpet in Hollywood someday, and we all know it.
Up-and-coming teen ingenue Odile Rose is what the Variety article I read called her. As though everything about that phrase isn’t a built-in cliché.
At school, though, Odile never says a word to anyone. She stars in our shows whenever she happens to be in town, but it’s obvious she thinks she’s better than all us high school peons. She’s a year ahead of me, so I’ve never really spent much time around her, but I’ve heard plenty of stories from the upperclassmen. Apparently she just sits in class every day, staring blankly at the whiteboard with her perfect hair and vacant eyes. In rehearsals last year, she said her lines when she was supposed to and spent every other minute sitting off in a corner with David Patel and Sebastian Santos, the best two actors in our school other than her. (They also happen to be the only two high school students she’s ever deigned to interact with.)
“Do you remember her in that Super Bowl commercial?” Pops asks Dad. “She made me cry.”
“You cry over everything,” I remind him. “No offense.”
“Ooh, I remember that,” Gabby says, which is unfair, because this is the second time tonight she’s taken their side. “She was incredible.”
“See!” Pops points to Gabby in triumph. “Validation. Thank you. Gabby, I now officially like you better than my own daughter.”
“Oh my God, Pops. Seriously.”
“Did you not see the ad, Mel?” Dad reaches for his phone. “Here, I’ll pull it up.”
“I’ve seen it.” I edge away. I have no idea why everyone’s so obsessed with Odile. Sure, she can sing and stuff, but I hate how everyone acts as though that makes her God’s gift to the universe. I know performing’s a skill, but the work I do is hard too, and no one ever fawns over the tech crew. “We don’t need Odile. All she does is make the other actors nervous, and that’s a nightmare for us to deal with. Besides, it’s not like she’s that much better than everybody else.”
Dad and Pops exchange a look. Even Gabby casts me a doubtful glance.
“Anyway, I haven’t told you the best part yet.” I wait until they’re all looking at me expectantly. “I get to be SM again!”
“Woo-hoo!” Pops shouts. Dad lets out a low whistle.
I beam up at them. I’m no less excited than I was when Ms. Marcus first told me the news. I’ve had wild, crazy fantasies about the day I’d get to stage manage Les Mis, but I thought it would be years from now.
My obsession with the show started in sixth grade, when I found the cast recording in a pile of Will’s old CDs. Since then, I’ve read the original 1,500-page novel and seen every adaptation I could find. A couple of years ago, my dads took me to see the musical in New York as a surprise birthday present, and I thought my heart was going to explode from glee before the prologue even started.
Stage-managing this show will be the high point of my school theater career. I can already picture myself talking about it in Backstage interviews years from now—how I got my start calling the cues for one of the most complicated musicals known to theater before my seventeenth birthday.
“Congratulations, honey,” Dad says. “I can’t say I’m surprised, but you certainly deserve it after how hard you’ve worked.”
“And Gabby said she’d be ASM again,” I add, not wanting her to feel left out.
“You sure you want to do that?” Pops asks her. “If you thought our daughter was a fierce taskmaster on R&J, I can assure you she’ll be even worse now that she’s working on a show she actually likes.”
“Don’t worry, Les Mis is my favorite too,” Gabby says. “I saw it on tour three times. I even dressed up as Enjolras for Halloween.”
Pops grins. “I retract my concern. You’re clearly very well suited to partner up on this.”
“Plus, Will said we get to build a turntable.” I wait for Dad to get excited about that part too, but his smile’s fading. I don’t know what his problem is. The original Broadway set for Les Mis was built on a turntable—a floor that spins, basically, for quick, dramatic set changes. It was so iconic they copied it for Hamilton. “And he’s bringing in a professional sound mixer.”
“We’re incredibly excited for you, sweetie,” Pops says.
“Although one of us isn’t exactly looking forward to how much work installing that turntable’s going to be.” Dad juts his chin toward my phone, which is still playing the last few notes of the overture. “But I’ll worry about that later. For now, you know what? I’m making that my new ringtone.”
“What, you’re just going to be walking around construction sites with dun-DUN blaring out of your pocket?” Pops asks, but Dad’s already started the download.
“Why not? I’ll tell anyone who asks that my daughter’s the stage manager for the world’s most beloved musical, and I couldn’t be more proud.”
“Okay, well.” My ears are probably turning red. “Gabby and I need to go upstairs and start working on the audition forms.”
“Of course,” Dad says. “Make sure you put at the top, ‘And if your name is Odile Rose, don’t bother auditioning, just name your part.’”
“Dad. Look. She’ll probably be off in Antarctica filming another Oscar-winning role by the time we start rehearsals. Besides, Ms. Marcus said it’s really important for me to go into the audition as a professional and not show favoritism to anyone, or—”
“Melody. Look. I’m being facetious.”
“Good,” I say, with a firm nod.
But as Gabby and I start up the stairs, I have a distinctly unprofessional thought:
That all our lives would be a lot simpler if, on audition day, Odile Rose is as far away from the Beaconville High performing arts wing as she can get.
Act 1
February
Spring Musical Audition Form
The Beaconville High School Performing Arts Department is pleased to present Les Misérables. Auditions will be held Monday after school. If you’d like to audition, sign up at the bulletin board outside the choir room no later than noon Monday.
At the audition, you will be asked to sing sixteen bars of a song of your choosing. Please bring sheet music if you would like the pianist to accompany you. If you do not bring sheet music, you may perform a cappella.
Please complete the form below and return it to the stage manager, Melody McIntyre, when you are called in for your audition.
First name:____________ Last name:____________
Grade:_____ Email:______
___________
Phone:____________________
Parents’/guardians’ names:____________________
Parents’/guardians’ phones:____________________
Parents’/guardians’ emails:____________________
Allergies:_________________________
Audition song:_________________________
Please list your current weekend and after-school activities:
Please specify any conflicts (travel, major events, etc.) you will have this spring, particularly in April and May, when the rehearsal and performance schedules will be most demanding:
_________________________________________________________________________________
The cast list will go up Wednesday afternoon. Break a leg!
Scene 1—Beaconville High School Choir Room
DAYS UNTIL SPRING MUSICAL OPENS: 87
“There are ninety-two names.” I show Ms. Marcus the photo I took of the sign-up sheet. “Should I start sending them in?”
Ms. Qiao winces, but Ms. Marcus shakes her head, all business. “Let’s give it another few minutes.”
“How many times do you think we’re about to hear ‘On My Own’?” Ms. Qiao taps something into her phone.
I try not to snicker. “On My Own” is Éponine’s big song in the second act of Les Mis, and anyone who’s ever taken a musical theater class knows you’re never supposed to audition with a song from the show you’re hoping to get cast in.
Ms. Qiao’s the choir teacher, so she’s the Les Mis musical director. She’s in charge of making sure everyone knows how to sing their songs. Ms. Marcus is the director director, so she’s in charge of everything else.
Casting the show is up to the two of them. I’m only here to show people in and out and keep things running more or less on time.