He really didn’t like “Art” or the arts, or music or theatre. He had not read a book in years, not even the ones that bore his name. If it wasn’t on TV, it wasn’t really entertainment. Tweeting! Now, that was entertaining. But theatre? No. Nah. Forget it. He had never attended one Kennedy Center Honor. He didn’t even know where the hall was. The last time he actually was in a Broadway theatre was in the last century when wife number three forced the issue by holding back sex. Sure, he had gotten her the job, used his influence, and pushed her no-talent ox-ness on the producer, who owed him big time from some real estate deal. But, in the end, he had no interest in actually sitting through the musical comedy drivel for two hours plus. But the no-talent wife held back her only real talent and the no-talent wife prevailed.
He hated wearing the tux, which hugged him in all the wrong places. He hated her being the star of the evening. He hated her picture on Page Six of The Post, even though his press agent had planted it. He hated the stupid show and certainly wasn’t thrilled watching other men look at what he considered his property. He despised the usherettes who flirted with him as they gave him his program and showed him to his seat. He hated his seat. Too damn close to the stage and to other people. He detested the house manager who didn’t let him commandeer the men’s room at intermission, forcing him to line up with the peasants from New Jersey and pee in front of God knows who.
He loathed the Palace Theatre, that former Mecca of Vaudeville.
As the decades and wives flew by, he never forgot how much he hated the Palace. So when the historic property secretly came on the market, he snatched it up (beating out the Shuberts!) and planned to turn the hallowed building into retail space, over which would sit an overheated hotel bearing his name. He pretended that all the work being done to the “land-marked” theatre was preservation. The public was to think that he was going to raise it up off the ground, inch by inch. For three years. But as the venerable walls crumbled and the ancient stage that once bore Judy Garland (“that fag hag”) and Sarah Bernhard (“who?”) disintegrated into dust behind protective barricades, he stood in Times Square and giggled like a schoolgirl.
It had been one year since Broadway had been lit. One year since any Broadway theatre had heard applause or felt more than the glow of a ghost light. The world had been closed. Closed by a virus. Millions had died. The ones that didn’t die got into ragingly violent battles in the streets as he watched and egged them on from his twitter page. Anger and fear fueled the country. The economy crumbled like the stage of the Palace, but he only got richer.
And now, tonight, he was entering a Broadway theatre named for Richard Rodgers (“He was a famous composer, sir.” “Oh yeah? So what? I had my own TV show.”). He was alone. None of the theatres were yet allowing audiences in or contemplating selling tickets, as the danger was still out there. But he was bored and demanded, nay commanded a performance.
“I could have made them put on Les Mis or Phantom, but they didn’t want to open for me. They were fake hits anyway. Well, I wanted to see something American in any case, to see my founding fathers, and someone told me this was the hottest ticket in town…before all this happened.”
In the days of shows, it was indeed the hottest ticket. Some people had paid one thousand dollars for the privilege of witnessing the show, but for the last twelve months not a cent was taken in at the box office. Until now.
He had paid ten million dollars for the best seat in the house. The safest seat. The only seat. One on the aisle. Row D. He thought about the Presidential box, but remembered some old story about Lincoln and decided not to chance it.
Once the difficult decision had been made by the management to do the show (“Think of the publicity” “Think of the backers” “Think of us.”), the cast had a few weeks to bone up on a musical they hadn’t done for a long time. Finding people to perform was not easy. Some of them refused to go on, citing their hate for him. Some had died. Others were sick. Still, culling actors from tours and stock and from replacements and understudies, they were able to scrape a cast together. One that would take the risk for one night and not wear masks and gloves on stage (they would be masked and gloved backstage) and not stand six feet apart when they sang to each other. After all was said and done, everyone needed to pay the rent. So they rehearsed and in time they were ready for their audience of one.
The marquees all along the West 40s had remained lit despite having no shows to advertise. The same signage as before the virus beckoned audiences that now didn’t exist. Broadway was in a state of suspended animation. Now, as the eight o’clock curtain loomed, for the first time in over a year, the lobby lights were on, the house lights glowed, the orchestral sounds of tuning up came from the pit and one could feel the anticipation in the air. That the anticipation came only from one side of the footlights was incidental. At last the audience of one entered the auditorium. Most of the seats were still covered over in plastic to keep the dust off them. The plastic coverings themselves had a grimy yellow color that would never be erased.
“Am I supposed to sit on plastic?” he grumpily asked the house manager showing him to his seat.
“Of course not, sir. We have uncovered our best seat for you. One on the aisle. It’s where Obam…” The manager stopped talking as he realized his gaffe. “You will forgive me for wondering why your wife is not joining you tonight.”
“She’s busy. Very, very busy…with her lawyer. And her English was never that good anyway. Lucky for me, she could never pronounce pre-nup.”
As they approached the newly uncovered and sanitized seat, the manager took his wet overcoat and handed him a Playbill and complimentary souvenir book.
“I’ll hang this up so that it will be dry for you after the show.”
“This rain. Have you ever seen anything like it? A whole month. I never saw anything like it. I de-funded the National Weather Service. They didn’t predict this.”
The house manager listened with his mouth open and then finally spoke.
“The show will begin in a few minutes. I hope you enjoy it.”
“For ten mil, I better. Got any Milk Duds?”
As the show began and the rapping and singing and dancing started, he looked into his program with a penlight. As it progressed, he found that he was bewildered and started to speak out loud.
“George Washington was Black? I never knew that. Didn’t he also have wooden teeth? Hey! Could you go back and tell me again why Hamilton was allowed to be in the government if he wasn’t American? Immigration laws must have been very weak back then. They should have built a wall. Wait a minute, which Schuyler sister is he marrying? What happened to the third one? I like that tall girl dancing in her underwear.”
As the lights came up for intermission, he jumped out of his seat looking for the men’s room.
“I hope there’s no line,” he quipped as he passed the house manager at the top of the aisle.
Backstage, in the greenroom, and in their dressing rooms, the cast again in masks and gloves retouched their eye makeup, warmed up, and looked at each other blankly. Was this really happening? Were they really performing their hearts out for this person? This man who denied (“It’s a hoax!”) and then fueled (“We have no ventilators. Why wear a mask? I don’t wear a mask? There are tests for all!”) a pandemic and by some grace of God or Devil got away with not catching as much as a cold. Each of the actors personally knew people sick, dying or dead. A few of them knew that they themselves should not even be in the building, but home in bed.
The second act passed much faster than the first, as he dozed on and off, waking only when he heard the shot that killed Alexander. Thinking that the show must be over, he rose from his seat only to realize that the music and action were continuing and, even though the star was dead, the show had twenty more minutes to go.
Finally it was done. He applauded mildly at the curtain calls and, before he could fully stand to leave, the manager was at his side.
“It was tremendous. Great. I didn’t understand why his widow got the last twenty minutes though. He was the powerful one. The breadwinner. Why do we care what she has to say? Also, why was George Washington Black again?”
“Sir, the cast would be honored to meet you.”
“Of course they would be. Who wouldn’t?”
“Follow me, please.”
The House Manager took him through a small secret looking door. Tall as he was, he had to crouch a bit and lower his head to get through into the tight, dark corridor that led to a few stairs and up to the stage. There they all were, still in their 18th century costumes. Hamilton covered in fake stage blood, each Schuyler Sister still in her dingy gowns. The multi-racial cast, backstage crew and orchestra stood in a nervous line facing out into the empty house, as if they were to be presented to the Queen. They all seemed relieved to be done with the show and simultaneously thrilled to have been allowed to perform again. They also wished they could be home. Each had donned their surgical masks and were once again gloved in vinyl.
As he stood before them, he surveyed the set, touched a costume or two worn by a female dancer and then, seeing the sea of masks and gloves, thought better of getting too close. So he backed up.
“It was a great show,” he unconvincingly muttered as he took another few steps backwards. “Just great…maybe not worth ten million dollars, but you know…it’s ten million my soon-to-be-ex won’t get.” He waited for a laugh that never came.
They all just stared at him as he continued to step back and away from them. “The masks aren’t necessary, you know. I never wear them,” he said as he headed one step closer to the orchestra pit. The assembled parties breathlessly watched as he stepped back again and didn’t move at all when he tumbled backwards into the orchestra pit hitting the cymbal, which crashed…symbolically. There seemed to be one moment suspended in time and then they heard a moan.
“Owwwwww! Somebody fucking help me. I can’t breathe!”
Still no one moved.
Finally, one small male dancer could stand the moans and groans no more. He ran over to the pit and jumped down to where he was crumpled, stuck between the drum kit and two huge electric keyboards.
“Are you going to fucking help me?” He bellowed.
“You said you couldn’t breathe. Do you need mouth to mouth?”
“No! Just help me up. There’s a goddamned violin in my back.”
“It’s a viola,” the dancer said while lowering his mask and taking off his gloves. “I really think you need mouth to mouth.”
“I do not need mouth to…”
And suddenly his speech was interrupted as the dancer held his head and blew into his mouth. The small dancer was wiry and strong and easy held the 72 year old man down to administer the breath of life. Finally after a few minutes, the dancer stopped, allowing him to scream.
“Get your tongue out of my mouth, you fag!”
The dancer did as he was told and backed off.
By this time several others had entered the orchestra pit and helped him up from the ground. He brushed himself off and after realizing he could walk and was fine, stormed out of the theatre, forgetting about his coat, to his waiting limo which was across the street. Soaked to the skin, he went back to Washington to do whatever it was he did.
The next day it was still raining and life went back to abnormal on Broadway. Lit marquees advertising shows that would not be playing, not even for an audience of one. And it rained. Boarded up restaurants suspiciously faced movie theatres playing no movies. And it rained.
As the rain fell for the fortieth day in a row, he got bored with tweeting and decided to straighten the money in his bill fold, a small pleasure he had inherited from his father, who would do it nightly after coming home from work. He had several twenties and lots of singles and even a hundred bearing the photo of Ben Franklin, but only one ten dollar bill and this caught his eye. There he was, Alexander Hamilton, looking nothing like that Puerto Rican boy who sang and jumped around in the show. He straightened the bill and put it back among the others and suddenly found he could not catch his breath and a hacking dry cough erupted from his throat. Just as suddenly, his head began to throb as if that cymbal in the pit were still reverberating on top of him. He decided to lay down and wait it out. Surely it would all pass. He was the healthiest man ever. He never got sick. Never.
But as his pain increased and his cough got dryer and more insistent, he could see through the windows, that the rain stopped falling.
After forty days and forty nights, the sun came out, bright as the eyes of God, and it lit up the earth as it dried it out. Someone had once told him that there were more important things than living. He had laughed then, but now, as a dove flew by his window clutching a flowering peach in her mouth, all he could do was cough and wish for one more day.
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About
Stephen Cole is an award-winning musical theatre writer who has been produced from New York City to London to the Middle East and Australia. His off-Broadway musical with Matthew Ward, AFTER THE FAIR, was nominated for the Outer Critic’s Circle Award for Best Musical and was subsequently produced in London to great acclaim. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER won the prestigious Edward Kleban Award and was produced in NYC, Dallas and San Francisco where it was nominated for several Bay Area Theatre Awards. SATURDAY NIGHT AT GROSSINGER’S has had successful runs in Texas (Starring Gavin MacLeod), LA, Florida & Sonoma. Broadway legend Chita Rivera toured in CASPER and Hal Linden and Dee Hoty starred in the world premiere of his musical adaptation of DODSWORTH.
In 2005 Stephen was commissioned to write ASPIRE, the first American musical to premiere in the Middle East. This experience resulted in another musical about the creation of the show entitled THE ROAD TO QATAR!, produced to rave reviews and awards Off-Broadway, London and at Edinburgh Festival garnering a Best Musical nomination. Other produced shows include ROCK ODYSSEY, which played to hundreds of thousands of kids for 10 seasons of productions at the Adrienne Arscht Center in Miami. Stephen’s musical MERMAN’S APPRENTICE was a smash hit at Birdland in NYC and has a cast album on Jay Records and premiered in Sonoma, CA to great acclaim and awards in 2019. Stephen’s newest musical is GOIN’ HOLLYWOOD, which played to sold out houses in Dallas and is on its way to a London production. His latest opus is his one man show CAMELTON, which he will perform for the month of August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Published books include: THAT BOOK ABOUT THAT GIRL, I COULD HAVE SUNG ALL NIGHT, MARY & ETHEL…AND MIKEY WHO? and CAMELTON. Visit http://www.stephencolewriter.org
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