1634: The Ram Rebellion (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  “Would you like some refreshments, Frau Matowski?” She was totally the graceful hostess, but I was pretty sure that she would prefer I didn’t accept the invitation. There was no sign of impatience or anything, but the message was clearly there. She had her videos and now she wanted to watch them.

  “Thank you for the offer, Highness, but I have to get back to work. Perhaps after you have seen the performances we can get together and talk about them.” She smiled, her arms wrapped around the basket of videos. Then with a small curtsey she returned to Elisabeth Sofie and Countess Emelie. I waved to them as I turned and followed Lady Ulrike.

  “She really should have followed you to the door. What are manners coming to?” I turned my head to look at Lady Ulrike. She was slowly shaking her head at the lack of manners being displayed by her charge. “Thank you, Frau Matowski, for bringing the videos. The princess will take good care of them. Both Duchess Elisabeth Sofie and Countess Emelie know how to use the ‘video player’ so that should present no problems.”

  Just as we made the door I could hear clearly the opening notes of the William Tell Overture. I turned to Lady Ulrike and took her hand in mine and gripped it lightly. “I hope you do not come to hate me for bringing the videos. I think you are going to get very tired of that piece of music.” With a shake of her head and a smile, she waved me on my way.

  * * *

  I bumped into Mary Simpson and her loyal lieutenants a few times over the next few days. They dropped into rehearsals to keep me up to date on progress, and what a lot of progress there was. Mary’s Mafia, as I had come to think of her gang of loyal lieutenants, had gone though town like a miniature tornado. A bank account was arranged so I could pay expenses and wages. Cloth was arriving for costumes. Artisans were building props and back drops. Even the programs had been sent off to the printer. They were going to print color pictures of the dancers in the program, at least for the first night and collectors program. There was some serious money being spent on this first season of ballet.

  As far as I was concerned, the most important thing Mary achieved was getting the high school auditorium for five days around the New Year, Wednesday through to Sunday night. Hopefully this would give us sufficient time to set up scenery and lights, and run a couple of dress and lighting rehearsals. I was thankful for her intervention. There was no way I could have persuaded the powers that be to give me full access to the auditorium for that period of time. Not with the demand for the facility being what it was.

  * * *

  The dancers moved into the auditorium on Wednesday, straight after morning training. Crews under the control of Mary’s lieutenants had been moving the scenery and backdrops into place before we arrived. While the technicians set up the props and scenery according to my plans, I chased up the lighting technicians, hoping to get the lights set up quickly so we could have a lighting rehearsal.

  Meg and Deanna Matowski, a couple of my cousins by marriage, led the ballet mothers as they checked out the changing facilities. Their reports weren’t promising. When we had used the auditorium for the Gala night we never had more than a dozen performers on stage at a time, and most hadn’t needed to change costume. Suddenly we had over forty performers trying to change, fix make-up, or stay warm and limber in an area not designed for that number of performers. It was going to be a madhouse.

  “Bitty, there’s no way my Glenna Sue is getting changed in those rooms. The only separation between the boys and girls is a few blankets hung over a wire. It’s not good enough. I demand that my daughter be given a proper changing room,” came a voice from behind me. It wasn’t actually bellowing, but it was close. That could only be the Ballet Mother from Hell, Laurie Haggerty. I turned around. Right the first time.

  “Laurie, there are NO changing rooms. There is that tiny Green room, or the showers. Otherwise the only other space is the couple of classrooms we have managed to grab. Believe me, I would love to be able to give your Glenna Sue a proper place to change and put on makeup. But we have to go with what we have.”

  “Well, can’t you at least have the boys in one room and the girls in the other?”

  “Sorry Laurie, but it’s easier if rooms are allocated by role, the Mice in one room, the Soldiers in the other. Party guests in one room, Land of the Sweets dancers in the other. Otherwise we’d never keep track of the performers.”

  “Well, it’s not good enough!” Having had the last word, Laurie went off in a huff.

  She was right. It wasn’t good enough. However, it was the best we had. If someone ever built a proper theater for the performing arts it would be nice if they could actually build one that catered to the needs of the performer. Maybe, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

  I’d danced in too many less than ideal facilities in the past to think catering for the performers actually rated as important to the designers and people funding them. The problem was all those special features performers would love to have are hidden from the audience. Out of sight, out of mind.

  The punters like to see what they are getting for their money. So what if there is only one shower for all of the performers, and it runs out of hot water too quickly. The audience doesn’t care.

  * * *

  Thursday morning the sun still hadn’t shown itself as I made my way to the high school auditorium. We were about to have some real fun, a morning of general rehearsals on the stage, followed in the afternoon by a full dress rehearsal before visiting officials and media.

  I just love performing to the powers that be and the media. They sit just there. You know you have to put on a good performance, but there is no feedback. Politicians and critics, as a rule, make a lousy audience, hardly raising a cheer or applauding. If they weren’t so important to the continued well being of the company I would have banned them. However, Mary Simpson had arranged for them to attend. So attend they would.

  To make best use of our limited time the company worked out in one of the classrooms that had been set up with temporary barres while various scenes were practiced on the stage. People were coming and going between the changing rooms as costumes were checked out, and students practiced quick changes of costume. Those playing soldiers would be worst. At least the mice didn’t need a lot of makeup.

  We had to run through the scenes several times before the lighting technicians learnt what and when to illuminate. The pas de deux between my two pairings of leads were real fun. I had let Carl talk me into trying to recreate the scene from the Covent Garden version of Nutcracker where Nureyev, as the prince, first appears just after the fight with the Mouse King. It looked like it might work. First Cathy McNally as Clara was lit, then Joseph as the Nutcracker, standing in the back corner of the stage, arms raised as the spotlight is suddenly turned on.

  It took three tries, but eventually the lighting technician worked out where to point the spotlight. It lacked a little of the dramatic impact of the original, but then, Joseph was no Nureyev. Other than that, it was mainly a matter of getting the technicians used to tracking the performers. They just weren’t used to tracking people moving with the speed of my dancers, but by carefully making notes of where the performer should be at what point in the music they finally started to keep the spotlight on the soloists.

  Then we tried the full dress rehearsal with the audience of politicians and media. Anything that could go wrong did. Fortunately, there was nothing the audience could pick up on. First, there were logjams as the party guests poured off stage to change for the fight scene. It threatened to degenerate into an all-out brawl. There was considerable pushing and shoving. Some of the children were whacked around the ankles with out of control hobbyhorses, and a couple of the girls retaliated with their dolls. A couple of the dolls lost heads and limbs. One of the ballet mothers picked up the pieces and chased after the girls. Hopefully repairs would be possible.

  Then the Christmas tree refused to grow. There was supposed to be an Alice in Wonderland type effect, with Clara shrinking to the same size a
s the mice and toy soldiers. But the tree refused to move. Oh well, I doubt any of that audience would notice.

  Then we moved into the fight between the soldiers and the mice. It was flowing nicely. Carl and Joseph were making a real production of the fight between the Mouse King and Nutcracker. And then one of the children, trying to “die” theatrically, tripped and fell heavily. The young boy was in tears as he marched from the stage at the end of the scene. I managed to give him a cuddle and compliment him on staying in character until he was off stage before he was led away for attention by one of the small army of stage mothers. Hopefully he would be ready to come back for the final scene. I made a note to use what happened as a warning to the others.

  The performance seemed to be going well. The mass en pointe dances went without a hitch. The Sweet dances all went well, and the lighting technicians were even able to follow Carl at his most dynamic. Finally the rehearsal came to an end. We even got some applause from the audience. Most of it was from family of the cast who had been invited in to watch. The politicians and media representatives were embarrassed into giving nominal polite applause. Not like the princess. She was almost bouncing in her seat. It was probably only Lady Ulrike’s heavy hand that was holding her in place. The cast bowed and curtseyed to the audience before the curtain closed for the last time. I quickly got changed from my costume so I could go out and talk to politicians and media.

  * * *

  Friday morning. The end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end, I didn’t know which it was going to be. Tonight we put on our premiere performance, according to Mary Simpson, to a full house. The future of my ballet company could live or die on tonight’s performance.

  Everybody who had any claim to being anybody, who wasn’t otherwise detained or required for military service, was going to be there. Half of the blue bloods from Magdeburg had already invaded Grantville. Most were staying in the houses of friends and acquaintances who had homes in the area. Duchess Elisabeth Sofie’s mother and father were back for the performance and had opened their Saalfeld house to guests. Count Ludwig, Emelie’s husband, was in attendance. The sudden influx of people and their money was pushing up demand and local prices for accommodation.

  On the merchandising front, Melba Sue and her team of ceramic artists were working overtime, and were still unable to meet demand for their range of ballet and Brillo figurines. Other artists were pumping out paintings of the performers, and hanging in pride of place in the auditorium foyer was a large oil painting of Carl and Staci as Cavalier and Sugar Plum Fairy in a scene from the ballet.

  Meanwhile, I had heard that Flo was being run into the ground with demand for Brillo merchandise. There was even a story going around that someone had offered some obscene amount to buy Brillo. The fact that he was still on Flo’s farm was, as far as I was concerned, proof positive that there was no truth in that story.

  Before class started I did a check for injuries. Franz Sprug, the boy who hurt himself yesterday, was a little bruised and tender, but otherwise okay. Nobody else admitted to carrying an injury. That was expected. Not only were the performers going to get paid for this short season, but tonight would be a historic occasion. Nobody wanted to miss it.

  My son Joseph played up a little, pretending to have developed a limp, but a whack on the back of the head with a thrown pointe shoe soon had him scampering away. I couldn’t be too hard on him. His fooling around had broken the ice and people were visibly relaxing.

  For the next four hours I worked everyone into the ground. We were all sweating heavily, and some of the dancers were starting to droop when I called an end to rehearsal. I was happy with how everything was going. I sent everyone out to clean up, eat, drink, and get as much rest as they could before the evening premiere. They had about five hours before the curtain went up.

  * * *

  “Where the hell is Carl?” I was just about in a panic. The auditorium was starting to fill up and I couldn’t see him anywhere. Looking around I found Casey. “Casey, have you seen Carl? I’ve looked everywhere.”

  She pointed to a lump off in one corner of the Green room. He was sleeping. Again! How could he sleep at a time like this? I stamped my way over to him. A head poked out of the sleeping bag as I got close. “Is it time to start?”

  “Yes,” I just about roared. How dare he be so relaxed when I was so on edge? I watched as he slipped out of his sleeping bag, and bundled it into a corner. He then had the nerve to turn round and smile at me. “Warm up, you don’t want your muscles getting cold, not with how the soldier doll dance is supposed to end,” I said in a relatively controlled voice, all things considered.

  I was just turning away when a stifled chuckle stopped me dead. I turned and glared at Carl as he stretched out on the floor, warming up. I was severely tempted to kick him. Just then I felt a certain fellow feeling for Flo when Brillo was being unusually agreeable.

  Amber Higham, the knowledgeable expert Mary Simpson had dug up to serve as theatre manager for the ballet season, waved me over to look at the audience from behind the curtain. The seats were filling rapidly. There was a central roped off area that was filling up with dignitaries, and I’m sure, the princess. There couldn’t be that many young girls who might be seated in the VIP area. Around the roped off area, the more expensive seats were rapidly filling. Amber had told me how much she was charging for those seats. I’d been horrified. Then she told me the latest scalper’s price. Ouch. It looked like someone was making money out of my show.

  Looking at the rest of the audience I felt that Catharina Matzinger’s father would be happy. It looked like half the audience was fitted out in clothes made from his fancy new colored cloth, and the women didn’t look too drab either. With their batik silk gowns topped with fancy shawls made by Flo’s ladies, they made a pretty picture.

  Receiving a signal from somewhere in the auditorium Amber pulled me back to the performers. It was time to start. A quick survey of the technicians brought a forest of up-raised thumbs. We were ready to go. “Places” I called. With the stage set for the opening scene, and the party guests ready in the wings, I took one final calming look around. In just under two hours the performance would be over. I could hold together that long. From my position on the wings I signaled Deanna to start the music.

  * * *

  The curtain opened to the street scene. Snow was falling as guests started arriving for the party. Then, as Count Drosselmeyer passed into the house, the walls of the house pulled away, opening the drawing room to the audience. Doctor Stalbaum, his wife, Franz, the son, and Clara, the hero of the story, are greeting guests as they enter the drawing room. Then the children of the guests come in. They are seated on the floor for a puppet show. I don’t know if the audience really paid much attention to the puppet show, but it showed the Mouse King turning Count Drosselmeyer’s nephew into a nutcracker.

  After the puppet show it was time to carry on the dancing dolls. First there was Carl as the soldier. He was good. The full splits he fell into at the end of his little performance drew a few sympathetic groans from the audience. But there was little chance of Carl hurting himself. He would have practiced it a few times before coming on, and if he wasn’t comfortable with it, he would have left that bit out. It’s visually effective how his legs just slide out from under him, but if he hurt himself it would have killed the evening’s performance there and then.

  Next was Staci as the dancing doll. She spent only moments en pointe; if you weren’t watching carefully you could miss it or mistake it for demi pointe. Mark Matowski, yet another nephew, livened things up a bit as the Clown doll. Then it was time for the children to collect their gifts. Hobby horses for the boys, dolls for the girls. Except that Clara was given a Nutcracker Doll. The one used in the puppet show. The Nutcracker was subtly dressed in a MacKay plaid. The boys danced riding their hobby horses while the girls danced carrying their dolls. Nobody got tripped up or stumbled, and nobody got belted with a doll. All in all it went bette
r than expected. Finally they were off stage and it was time for Cathy’s solo.

  As Clara, Cathy danced for her nutcracker. She was adorable. She could only have done better if she was dancing en pointe. However, that was three or four years off. But she was doing really well even restricted to demi-pointe. I was so enthralled watching her that Harvey had to shake me to attract my attention. It was almost time for us to go on. There had been howls at home when I identified who would be the grandparents. There had been more howls, of laughter this time, at my husband’s reaction. But he was a good sport. Besides, we all knew he could do the part justice. He had performed it often enough in the past. The dance received the desired laughs from the audience as Harvey gloried in his bumbling grandfather act. Then we were off stage.

  There was pandemonium with dancers dashing to and from the changing rooms. The mice were already lining up as they finished changing, ready for the next scene. Cathy McNally slipped onto the darkened stage. Going over to the Christmas tree to check on her Nutcracker, she cradled it in her arms she lay down. As the clock struck midnight, the mouse dancers started to appear. They even managed to appear one by one, at their designated place, in time to the striking of the hour. They were chucking around the toys from under the tree as Cathy awoke. She was without her Nutcracker. She fought off the mice as she searched for her Nutcracker.

  Meanwhile the wall flats were withdrawn into the wings, giving the impression the room was growing. This time, thankfully, the Christmas tree grew on schedule. Then the soldiers, led by Joseph as the Nutcracker, appeared to fight the mice led by Carl’s Mouse King. Carl and Joseph made a real production of their fight. There was much leaping and jumping, and the ringing of steel as they fought with swords. I had protested about using steel blades, but both Carl and Joseph had insisted that the audience wouldn’t be impressed with the sound of wooden swords. While they fought, the mice seemed to be winning.