Cue the Dead Guy. H. Mel Malton
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I’d said. “The weight’s carefully balanced.”
“If you have to rebuild it, don’t come crying to me,” he’d replied. His face told me that if the puppet turned out to be too much for the actress to manage, he would be secretly delighted. This power-tripping was not uncommon in young stage managers, but it was obnoxious nonetheless.
“I’d better go over and interrupt,” Tobin said, “before Juliet hauls him into her office for a private audition.”
As Tobin moved away, he squeezed my elbow. “Go downstairs,” he said. “The party’s better in the shop.”
Steamboat Theatre is housed in an old marina on the shores of Sikwan Bay, next to the falls. On the main level are the offices and lobby, the rehearsal space is upstairs in the attic, and downstairs, where the boats used to be, is the shop.
Steamboat doesn’t have a performance space. There’s no point, because Steamboat’s a touring company. Their performance spaces are wherever there’s an audience; school gymnasiums, libraries, community centres, whatever.
The workshop is a wonderful space, but cold. They never got around to boarding up the open water, so the paint-tables and storage racks surround a square pool where several boats would be moored if the place were still a marina. It’s great in the summer, but awful in winter. They have space-heaters, but there’s still frigid water in the middle of the room, no matter what you do.
In the spring, when the smelt are running, you can dip a net into the pool, scoop up a bunch of flashing silver fish and fry them up right there on the workshop hotplate. In the summer, you can stop what you’re doing, strip off and have a swim. In the winter, your fingers freeze. The only good thing about the workshop in winter is that the cold temperatures make the contact cement dry really, really fast. I had been working in the shop since early April, and in Kuskawa, you never discount the possibility of snow until mid-June. It was May 7, and there was still a little snow on the ground, in the shady places.
It was jeezly cold down there that May evening. You could see your breath. A bunch of people were standing in a circle at the bottom of the stairs, and they all glanced up furtively when I opened the shop door. That could only mean one thing. Something of an illegal nature was being passed around. Goody.
Closest to the stairs was Meredith Forbes, the Belleville-based actress hired to play the Mother and the Cat characters. She had toured The Glass Flute before, twice—a Steamboat Theatre veteran. She was a moody-looking woman in her late twenties with dark smudges under her eyes. She wore crimson lipstick and was aggressively muscular and fit. She probably jogged every morning. On tour, she’d inevitably be the first person up in the mornings, the one to hog the motel-room shower. Rooming with her would be awful. She probably went to bed at nine. She wore a cat-costume which I had seen hanging in the wardrobe room, and she didn’t look very pleased about it. It was too small for her, and made her look like a lion that has eaten too much zebra.
Next to Meredith was Bradley Hoskins, the Toronto actor playing the Woodsman and the Dragon, an older man whose presence in the cast was unusual. Touring kids’ theatre is normally considered “paying one’s dues,” something every young actor has to do. It’s not a job that’s readily accepted by the more mature members of the theatre community. Maybe Hoskins really needed the money. I’d heard he was recently divorced and had a kid. I didn’t know for sure, but the tour would probably be a stretch for him. The job isn’t just about acting. It’s about loading and unloading sets and costumes and performing a show twice a day with a half-hour lunch break. It’s about sharing a room with several other actors and sitting in a cramped van on the road when you’re not performing. It’s not easy, and Bradley was kind of pudgy.
I didn’t envy Jason. It would be his job to drive the van and keep the peace. The cast, it seemed to me, was a bit oddly-matched.
Ruth Glass was down there, too. Ruth is the lead singer for Shepherd’s Pie, a folk band that’s pretty hot right now. Her partner, Rose, was in Seattle with her dying brother, so the band decided to take a six-month break. Ruth, never one to sit around, took on the Steamboat gig to keep her mind off Rose’s absence. She was officially the music director, and we were all pretty excited about it. Her job would be to work with the actors on the musical numbers in the show and to record the show tapes. She’d probably end up doing a lot of voice coaching as well, seeing as Amber Thackeray likely couldn’t project her way out of a wet paper bag.
When I joined the circle, Bradley was just sparking up a joint. I immediately imagined Detective Constable Mark Becker coming down the stairs and arresting all of us. I tensed up. Meredith pointedly didn’t partake, which made me wonder why she was down there. Maybe she was afraid she’d miss something, or perhaps she was secretly in league with Becker. When Meredith passed the doob to me (at least she wasn’t afraid to touch the stuff), I took the sweet smoke into my lungs, held on and wiped Becker from my thoughts. Take that, Officer. We started talking about the play.
“It’s not a bad script,” Bradley said, “but I’m not looking forward to sweating through two shows a day wearing those hoods. How are we going to breathe?”
“Through your mouth, as usual,” Meredith said. “You’ll get used to it. And you’ll sweat off a couple of pounds per show, guaranteed.”
“What do you mean by that?” Bradley said, bristling.
“I mean that the Flute is demanding, physically, Brad,” Meredith said. “That’s all.”
“You don’t think I’m up to it, is that it?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
These two would be a delight cooped up in a van together, I thought.
“Anyway, who cares about that stuff?” Brad went on. “We won’t be seen, anyway, right?”
“You’ll be in black from head to toe,” I said. “In the Flute, the actors are secondary to the puppets. You’ll get to take your hoods off for the bows at the end.”
“Guaranteed to bug Amber,” Meredith said. “She won’t like not being seen.”
“That’s not fair, Meredith,” Ruth said. “The kid’s enthusiastic as hell, and she doesn’t seem the type to worry about hood-hair.”
“You just wait,” Meredith said, darkly.
Tobin had joined us, and I wondered if anyone upstairs had noticed that the crowd in the lobby was getting thin. Everybody seemed to be in the “smoking room”.
“Thing I’m worried about is the lights,” Tobin said. “I’ve rigged up a new system that’s supposed to be easier to tour—lighter, more compact. But if more than one of the bulbs goes, we’re in trouble, ’cause I could only get two spares from Techtronics and they said they couldn’t get any more from the States until mid-June.”
“I’ve heard that UV lights are bad for you,” Brad said. “Like they’re radioactive or something.”
“Can you hit a high B-flat, Brad?” Ruth said. Shop talk, all of it. It bonded us.
There were footsteps on the stairs and Meredith, who was holding what was left of the joint, flicked it into the pool in the middle of the room. We all straightened up, just in case it was Juliet, who knew that people sometimes toked in the shop, but was known to throw tantrums if she caught them at it. It was dark down there. The lights were off, and we were all suddenly very quiet.
Down the stairs came two figures, Rico, or Ricki, I suppose, and a good-looking young man with short blonde hair and smooth, tanned skin, whose arm was around my friend’s shoulders. This must be Shane Pacey, I thought. The actor had been hired at the absolute last minute to play the lead character, Kevin, after Juliet’s first choice got a movie gig and backed out of his contract.
He was having a hard time with the stairs, and Rico was giggling like a school girl. Pacey was not wearing a costume. He had on a tight pair of jeans and a heartbreakingly lovely white wool sweater, which made his skin glow like