Authors: Michelle Knudsen
I promise.
I pull myself together and run through my preshow checklist again. It doesn’t matter what happens later. Not right now. Right now, the only truth is the old standby: the show must go on. I know how this works, and the knowing and the doing bring me back to calmness and purpose and happiness in fulfilling my piece of the whole.
Warm-ups end, and the cast and the musicians hurry backstage, and the ushers head for the doors with their armloads of programs, and the house is opened.
I settle myself off stage left, headset in place, listening to the murmurs from the lighting booth and the chattering voices floating in from the lobby and the squeaks and grunts of the old auditorium seats and all the other sounds of the slowly gathering audience. We’ve been informed that it’s a full house tonight, standing room only. There are three more performances scheduled, but apparently people did not want to wait. I certainly don’t blame them; I wouldn’t want to wait either.
When Mr. Henry calls five minutes, I feel Ryan’s presence next to me before I see him standing there.
“Hey,” I whisper. “All set? You look great.” Which he does, of course. He is the sexiest Sweeney Todd ever.
“Almost,” he says. “I just have to do one thing.”
He puts one hand on the wall behind me, and before I can even start to wonder what thing he’s talking about his other hand is under my chin and there’s not even time enough to finish my thought of
oh my God he better damn well be about to kiss me this time
before his mouth is on mine and the kissing is actually happening.
My whole brain just goes away. For however many seconds it lasts, there are just the kiss and my ecstatic nerve endings in every imaginable location and his mouth is soft and warm and I want to kiss him harder but I’m afraid of messing up his makeup, and so I just let him kiss me carefully yet thoroughly in the backstage preshow dimness. There’s still not much thinking going on. Just feeling. Lots of feeling. I am nothing but the physical sensations of where our lips meet and where his hand is still gently touching my face and where my blood is racing forcefully through all of my veins in response to my suddenly very, very poundy heart.
He pulls back, eyes smiling. My mouth opens but I can’t make words come out yet. I just stare back at him, which makes his mouth twist up into one of those Ryan Halsey grins which makes me glad I’m still sitting down on my nice sturdy stool.
“Break a leg,” he says softly.
“Yeah,” I manage, barely. “You too.”
He winks and then disappears into the darker backstage regions to get in position for the top of the show. I stare at the place where he was standing for several more seconds before I hear Liz on the headset trying to get my attention. “Cyn? You there? Everything okay?”
I force myself to focus. Mostly I just want to sit here and replay the last minute in my mind a few million times, but there is no time for that nonsense now.
Later,
I promise my brain. And my heart.
All you want.
“Yes, sorry!” I say into the headset mic. “All set here. You guys good?”
“Lighting booth set,” she says back. “Break a femur!”
I wish her the same and take a deep breath and struggle back to my calm and centered tech-director inner balance just as Mr. Henry calls places.
Later,
I tell myself one more time. But I don’t try to make myself stop smiling.
The houselights go halfway down, and then Mr. Henry walks out on stage to give the cell phone and flash photography speech, and then he walks down the side steps, and although I can’t see this part, I know he is walking up the aisle to take his reserved seat in the eighth row. Then the lights go down completely, and Mr. Iverson raises his baton, and then the overture begins.
And finally, the curtain goes up.
From the first soft notes of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” the magic of the performance is in full and powerful force. The silence and stillness of the audience is absolute; no one whispers, no one shifts in their seat, no one even coughs. The music and the voices of the opening number slowly build, line by line, moment by moment. Various principals and chorus members sing their parts from assorted positions across the stage, until the music swells and Ryan strides out on stage to join the others and add his voice to the rest. I feel the impact of this moment on everyone in the theater. Everything is amazing, and Ryan is the most amazing of all, and the show is off and running and we’re all making it happen together and I am once again blissfully, gratefully lost in the musical-theater magic and for the next 2.5 hours, nothing else exists at all.
During intermission, I give the chair one last inspection. It gets carried onstage for the first time during the opening number of act 2, so the audience hasn’t seen it yet. In that first song, after the chair gets delivered, Sweeney makes some “minor adjustments” to it, and then he and Mrs. Lovett test out the added special features by sending some lashed-together books down through the trapdoor into the bake house. The setup sometimes gets a laugh, and I’m excited for it, but of course what I really can’t wait for is the first time Sweeney sends a person down through the trapdoor. That’s when the chair will be in full effect, with the lights and flames and everything. “Break a leg, chair,” I whisper to it, patting it gently on the arm. Then Mr. Henry calls places for the second act, and I head back to my position.
The setup scene does get a laugh, which is great because I know it will make the horror of the first real onstage chair-death that much more effective in comparison. And then “Johanna (Quartet)” begins, lovely and tragic, and Claude seats himself in the chair as Ryan and Jerome (who plays Anthony, the young sailor) sing their lines. And then Ryan drags the razor across Claude’s throat, still singing, and the lights dim and the trapdoor opens and the audience gasps audibly as the red flame-lights burst forth to bathe Sweeney and the blood-spattered razor in hellish splendor, and his victim tumbles dying and terrified down into the depths.
I can hear them react again when the second killing happens, even though this time, of course, they’re expecting it. (Sweeney’s third killing is thwarted when his next customer shows up with a little girl in tow, and so he has to actually give the guy a shave and leave him alive.) Through the final sequence of the show, which includes the last and most significant murders, the chair and lights and music and the cast combine again and again to work their magic and transport the audience every single time. Jessica gives me a thumbs-up from her own perch stage right, and I grin back at her, relieved and proud and happy and grateful that everything worked the way I’d planned and hoped and desperately wished it would.
I am crying a little by the end. Part of it is the story, and part of it is still my lingering pride at the audience’s reaction to the chair scenes, and part of it is the huge release of the first night being just about over, and part of it is that I know bad things are going to start happening very soon.
The final notes fade, and the audience leaps to their feet almost as one.
Almost
as one; I am pretty certain that the first three standers by like a fraction of a second are Mr. Gabriel, Principal Kingston, and Ms. Královna. They are sitting together, a couple of rows behind Mr. Henry. The curtain calls begin: chorus, then minor roles, and then the leads. Principal Kingston gives a loud wolf whistle when Danielle, who plays Johanna, comes out, which is a little creepy. And they all — demons and humans alike — scream for Gina / Mrs. Lovett. But when Ryan walks out on stage, the roar from the audience is absolutely deafening. They love him. As they should. I am so proud of him, and of the whole group of us, and I lean out to see that other teachers are patting Mr. Henry heartily on the back, and even from here I can see that his eyes are glistening in the semidarkness.
The cast does a group bow, then points at the orchestra, and Mr. Iverson bows with arms spread to include the students who are still playing curtain-call music and so can’t actually bow themselves. Then the cast bows again.
And then they break into groups and point again, some backstage left, some backstage right, and some up at the lighting booth. The crew looks around at one another; this is not a standard part of the curtain call. I gesture them to go ahead. Why not? After a second I get off my perch to join them. We dart up onto the upper platform and bow together.
And then they all step back and leave me standing there a couple of feet in front of them, on my own, next to the chair, and Tom and Liz flash the lights and swing the trapdoor open, and Ryan yells, “Let’s hear it for the backstage crew and their fearless leader, Cyn Rothschild!”
And this is perhaps the coolest thing that has ever happened to me. Mary Chang never got to bow at the end of the show. I’m blushing and laughing and Ryan catches my eye and winks again, and what with the cheering and the recognition and the still-tingly aftermath of that preshow kiss, this may be one of the happiest moments of my entire life.
The cheering goes on and on, and everyone is shouting and clapping, and the cast and crew take bow after bow, and then suddenly the whole world seems to shift. I am still looking out at the auditorium, but there is another version of it superimposed on top of the real one — it is kind of a twisted reflection of the familiar school setting combined with something like the arena from that creature battle scene in
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
and the colors of everything are starting to run together and the happy shouts of the audience have started to become screams of terror.
Backpack. Oh, God. I start toward the platform stairs but before I get two steps someone slams into me and together we go tumbling down through the trapdoor.
We fetch up on the mattress in a tangle, and it takes me a second to realize it’s Ryan. My first crazy thought is:
How the hell did he get up the stairs so fast?
My second is:
I’m tangled up with Ryan Halsey on a mattress.
I have dreamed about this moment, oh, so many times, although this is not exactly how I have imagined it. I have to fight back a hysterical giggle.
My third is, as I notice how he is not trying to get up, how he is in fact attempting to keep me down under him:
He tackled me deliberately. He is trying to stop me.
Suddenly the other thoughts don’t matter anymore. I glare up at him furiously.
“No,” he says. “Don’t do it, Cyn. Please.”
I throw myself sideways, twisting away from him and off the mattress and stagger out the door of the pie shop. I don’t look back to see if he’s coming after me. I run for the prop table, nearly smacking my head on it as I lunge down for my bag and dig out the protractor and the textbook. Everyone is still screaming, but it is hard to see what’s happening, because the colors are still running together and starting to swirl around and, although I am probably the only one who can see this part, there is a flood of deep red underlying everything else.
Because . . . what I am seeing down underneath the real world is the demon world. Where lots of demons are.
Where Mr. Gabriel is about to take Annie.
Where I am about to go, too.
Oh, God.
The redness is bleeding into the other colors, and everything together is making this giant swirling vortex, kind of like a slow tornado funnel turned on its side.
I look to tenth-row-center and our own three demons are still there, and they seem to be arguing, but they are also changing. Their human forms are stretching horribly upward, becoming elongated and way less human and then really not human at all. As I watch, they expand into terrifying enormous things with some kind of ghostlike spirit-tentacles reaching out from the center where their faces used to be. Everyone else is struggling to get as far away from the vortex as possible; those three fling themselves into it.
I see Annie, who I somehow didn’t guess would be sitting right next to Mr. Gabriel (
stupid
), just as one of the tentacles loops around her. She looks shocked and confused and afraid, and she screams as she’s pulled in and down after Mr. Gabriel. A second later I see Danielle, also screaming, her eyes and mouth huge in her white, white face, her hands clawing at the dirty carpet, being pulled in as well. By Kingston? Which makes the inappropriate whistling during Danielle’s curtain call suddenly seem way less creepy in comparison to what he is doing now.
I shove the textbook as far as it will go down the back of my pants (uncomfortable but practical) and wrap the fingers of my right hand through the middle of the protractor and then I jump off the stage and go running toward the vortex. The fact that I am terrified and really, really don’t want to do this is lost in the central line of thought streaming steadily through my brain, that I need to go with them, I need to be there, I need to get down there if I’m going to save Annie. I hurl myself at the center but I only fall forward and smash into the broken auditorium chair behind it. I get up and throw myself at it again, but it still won’t work, it’s not working, it won’t
take
me and I don’t have a way to get in and I have to get in and I think my forehead is bleeding and they’re getting away and it can’t all be for nothing, it can’t, it can’t, the demoness was a liar and she’s just running away with the rest of them and this is it I’m losing her I’ll never see Annie again.
I look back in panic toward the stage and instantly lock eyes with Ryan, who is trying to push his way toward me through the throng. And then something circles my waist and I look down to see a tendril-tentacle that somehow I can tell belongs to Ms. Královna. It tightens and I yelp and I can feel the edge of the textbook, caught between me and the demoness’s boa constrictor–like grip, gouging at the skin of my back and I can barely breathe as she drags me painfully forward and down and down and —
and then stops.
I’m at the brink of the vortex, and
now
it wants me. Now it’s trying to suck me down, and the tentacle around me is pulling and pulling but Ryan has hold of my wrist and he is pulling me back.