My Life: The Musical (2 page)

AURORAROX
: whew, he’s gone

BwayPhil
: Now attention, ***true*** Aurorafans, it is now 8:02 . . . a mere twenty-five miles away, at the Rialto Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City . . .

BwayPhil
: . . . the overture for performance #1013 of Aurora is about to begin! Places, the call is places please! Get your CDs ready . . .

AURORAROX
: got mine.

BwayPhil
: Got mine! On my count, press PLAY. 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1

1

“ROCK ISLAND”

The Music Man

1957. Music, lyrics, and book by Meredith Willson

Sometimes—pretty often, in fact—sixteen-year-old Emily Pearl wished that her life were a musical.

A fabulous Broadway musical,
she’d think.
With me as the star.
And every Saturday morning when she and Philip took the Long Island Rail Road from Rockville Centre into Manhattan to see the matinee performance of
Aurora,
the thirty-eight-minute train ride would magically transform into a toe-tapping, finger-snapping, Broadway-style production number.

The
chug-chug-chug
of the train would set the tempo. The conductors would tap-dance down the aisles, punching holes in the passengers’ tickets to a syncopated beat. The babies would cry in key, the ringing cell phones would coalesce into a catchy melody, and soon the passengers would be swinging from the overhead luggage racks and belting out a happy traveling tune.

“Penn Station!”

That’s how the number would end, with everybody singing very loudly, in lots of harmony parts.

“Penn Station!

Next and last stahhhhhhhhhhp!”

Thunderous applause.

Emily blinked and looked around. The train was as it always was, noisy and filled with sour-faced people reading the newspaper. The last note of the musical number was still ringing in her mind. It would take only the tiniest provocation, she felt—someone humming the right note, or gesturing in a particularly theatrical way—to cast the spell that would make it truly begin. She nudged Philip with her foot.

“Philip?”

“Hmmm?” Philip was busy updating the
Aurora
spreadsheets. These meticulously kept records chronicled every performance of
Aurora
the two of them had seen, all the way back to the first preview nearly three years before. Data categories included the weather, the exact locations of their seats, whether there were any understudies on, and anything unusual that might have happened during the performance (sometimes an actor flubbed a lyric or something went wrong with the set—mishaps like these were always terribly exciting in live theatre).

“Show question.”

“Shoot.”

“Has there ever been a
musical number,
” Emily asked, staring dreamily out the train window at the little suburban houses flitting by, “a
production
number, that took place on a moving train?”

“Easy,” he said. “
The Music Man,
opened on Broadway 1957. Book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Willson—two L’s. The opening number is called ‘Rock Island.’ It takes place on a train and it’s not even sung; it’s spoken in rhythm.” Philip smiled. “Great show. Rarely has a triple-threat author created a work that succeeds so well on all three levels: book, music, and lyrics.”

It only took Emily a second to remember what Philip meant by “triple-threat.” Most musicals had a composer, who wrote the music; a lyricist, who wrote the words to the songs; and a book writer, who came up with the story and wrote the script. Some shows had music and lyrics by one person and book by another, and some had music by one person and book and lyrics by another. But rarely did one person do all three jobs. There was no rule against it as far as she knew; Emily supposed it was just too hard to be good at everything.

“
Aurora
succeeds on all three levels,” she said, somewhat defensively. She’d been feeling protective of the show since their weird encounter in the chat room with that SAVEMEFROMAURORA jerk. Banal?
Aurora?
Please.

“Yes, but nobody knows if
Aurora
was written by one, two or three people.” Philip finished tallying some numbers in his head, jotted the answer on his spreadsheet, and looked up. “Who knows, it might even be more than three.
A Chorus Line
was based on interviews with the entire original workshop cast.
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
was partly derived from group improvisations.” He was prepared to give more examples, but Emily didn’t need to hear them.

Instead, she started singing softly to herself.

“Never be enough,
My love for you could never be enough,
Ten thousand years could never be enough
To say what’s in my heart. . . .”

Emily sang in time with the rhythm of the train as she took a notebook and pen out of her messenger bag. The bag, a Hanukkah gift from her parents, had the familiar
Aurora
logo printed on it: a silhouette of the show’s star, the divine Marlena Ortiz, her mittened hands reaching up to the sky and a long multicolored scarf twirling ribbonlike in the air around her. Emily started to write.

“Whatcha doing?” murmured Philip, perusing his copy of
Variety,
the weekly show-business newspaper. Last week
Aurora
’s ticket sales had dipped slightly, but the weather had been horrible. Funny how things like that made a difference. “I need a ‘persuasive essay’ for English comp on Monday.” Emily tapped her pencil eraser against her lower lip. “And I just figured out what my subject is.”

Philip frowned. “Didn’t Henderson tell you not to write about the show anymore?”

“It’s not about the show.” She leaned forward, bright-eyed with inspiration. “I’m going to write about Aurora. Aurora
herself
. The person who
wrote
the show.”

“I don’t see the difference, it’s still
Aurora
.” Philip didn’t look up from his
Variety
. “Besides, nobody knows who wrote the show. Except whoever it was, of course.”

“Hmmph,” said Emily, undeterred. “But somebody
did
write it, that’s the point! ‘
Aurora,
By Herself.’ That’s what it says in the
Playbill,
and on the posters, and on the marquee. There
is
an Aurora, somewhere.”

“True, but Henderson might not see it the same way.”

“This is a persuasive essay,” said Emily, a mad gleam in her eye, “and I’m going to persuade the reader that Aurora, the
real
Aurora, is actually two people: a collaborative team of composer-lyricist and book writer.” She thought for a moment. “Or maybe it’s a composer and lyricist–book writer, I’m not totally sure. But one of them is a man, no older than thirty, with a rural background but highly educated. The other is a woman, not from the United States, often depressed, perhaps a former actress . . .”

The train had gone into a tunnel now, and the lights flickered off and on the way they always did at such moments. Emily didn’t notice. She continued spinning her theory, basing it on “hints” and “clues” she found in the dialogue and lyrics, costumes and staging of the show. Some of these “hints” she elevated to “compelling evidence,” and only one time did she use the word “proof.” She thought that showed a lot of restraint, which Mr. Henderson was bound to appreciate.

Philip gave up trying to dissuade her and spent the rest of the trip neatly stowing his spreadsheets, highlighters, and freshly sharpened pencils in his backpack. There was no point in trying to reason with Emily about
Aurora
. Her all-consuming love of Broadway musicals, like his, was as fixed and inevitable as the carefully scripted, rehearsed, choreo-graphed, spotlit, and underscored shows themselves. Real life was a dull, chaotic mess by comparison.

“Penn Station, next and last stop,” crackled the conductor’s voice over the speakers. “All passengers must leave the train. Penn Station, last stop.”

Emily and Philip had arrived. New York City, home of Times Square, Broadway, the Rialto Theatre, and
Aurora
.

2

“SUR LA PLAGE”

The Boy Friend

1954. Music, lyrics, and book by Sandy Wilson

Playing “stump Philip” was the preferred way to kill time on the
Aurora
rush ticket line. A steady steam of questions arrived, some verbally, some written on scraps of paper and passed down the line from person to person. Some days Philip declared a theme: Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, for example, or shows of the 1930s, but today he was only fielding questions about
Aurora
.

“How many performances have there been to date?” (A little under three years’ worth: 24 previews, 989 performances, total 1,013.)

“How many fake flower petals are released over the audience each night during the curtain call?” (Roughly a ton per performance, eight tons a week.)

“How many musicians are in the pit?” (Twelve, plus four “pit singers,” who sang along with the chorus when the onstage performers got breathless from trying to sing and dance at the same time.)

“How much did the show initially cost to produce?” (Six and one half million dollars.)

There were many facts about
Aurora
, and Philip knew them all, but his personal favorite was the length of each performance. The first act of
Aurora
ran sixty-six, sixty-seven, or sixty-eight minutes, depending on how much applause there was. The second act ran fifty-nine or sixty minutes. Intermission was always sixteen minutes. The figures never varied, which Philip found extraordinary, since when his mother went to work on a Monday and said “See you later,” sometimes it meant later for dinner and other times she didn’t come home for two days because of a business trip to Wilmington that she’d forgotten to mark on the calendar.

“Hey,” said Emily, tugging at his sleeve. “Check it out, Ian’s back from Florida.”

Together they looked down the rush line, which formed every Saturday morning in front of the theatre and snaked down Forty-fourth Street until it turned the corner on Eighth Avenue. If you arrived before ten a.m. with cash and had the fortitude and strong bladder to wait in line until one p.m., when the rush tickets were distributed, you might get one of the thirty discounted tickets that were put aside for Saturday matinees. Thirty tickets, day of performance only, first come, first serve. They were bad seats, too, upstairs and all the way to the side, but for twenty-five dollars who could complain?

In theory, the goal of the rush line was to make sure non-wealthy people could afford to go to the theatre. In practice, the thirty tickets almost always went to some subset of the hard-core Aurorafans, all of whom had seen the show dozens of times. It was a strange club, with its own cliques and factions, and Emily and Philip considered themselves among its more reasonable members.

From a half block away, Ian spotted them and waved. He broke into a graceful, waltzing skip and proceeded to pas-de-bourrée down Forty-fourth Street until he arrived at their spot on the line.

“Emily! Philippe!
Mes amis!
” He gave Emily a pair of Euro-style kisses, one on each cheek, and a somewhat more manly high five was exchanged with Philip.

“How was
The Boy Friend
?” asked Philip.

“Duh-READful show!” Ian said happily. “And the Florida audiences were, shall we say, elderly! But it was great fun spending winter break
sur la plage
”—he cast his eyes downward in a winning imitation of humility—“and I am now the owner of . . . it’s such a small matter, I can hardly bring myself to say it . . .”

“A fake tan?” laughed Emily. “A shuffleboard trophy?”

“No, you suburban wench! An Equity card!” Ian threw his fists in the air and started singing the theme song from
Rocky,
except with these words: “I am a man with an Equity card! I am a man with an Equity card! Equi, Equi, Equi-ty card!”

If my life were a musical,
thought Philip, with a deep rumble of feeling that was not unlike envy,
I’d start singing right along with him.
But Ian was an actor and could behave like a fool in public; it was expected. Philip had no desire to perform. He was a numbers man, and left the carrying-on to others.

“Ian! That is so awesome!” Emily jumped up and down in celebration. “Just wait! You’ll be on Broadway before you know it.”

“I’m nervous, actually.” Ian shoved his hands into his pockets against the chill. “Going pro really means ‘Hello, unemployment.’ I’ve worked at every non-Equity summer stock company on the East Coast, but those days are gone. Now I have to hold out for union work. Compete against the stahhhhs.”

Philip punched him playfully in the arm. “C’mon, you’re not even out of high school yet, and you made the union. You’re way ahead of the game.”

“Says you!” Ian said, pouting. “I swear, I am the only member of LaGuardia’s senior class who hasn’t done a
Law & Order
episode yet. I know I nailed the audition. I even scared myself.
Bam! Bam!
” Ian lunged murderously at Philip, then took an imaginary shot to the midsection and crumpled to the sidewalk in a limp heap. Emily and Philip applauded politely.