Luda, p.4
Luda, page 4
And although I haven’t mentioned her yet—this is Luda’s story.
Everything that happened, everything that’s about to happen, is because of Luda.
There.
Now we’ve all gotten to know one another, let’s move on to Luda.
Can we try that over again?
How many times had those six words tramped in formation across the windswept parade ground of my mind?
In the quotidian world, you get one chance and one alone. Rattle the dice in the cup, pray for the half dozen, and go for it; the moment will never come again. We pass this way but once. All the things you never did will haunt you in that hospital bed at the end. Mektoub.
In the theater it’s different, we have rehearsal.
Can we try that over again?
That rolling fruity voice, all too easy to imitate, was the primary weapon in the impressive dramatic arsenal of Dominick Float, director of The Phantom of the Pantomime, and those were his favorite words in all the dictionary.
Can we try that over again?
By smoldering wet July, rehearsals for the triumphant Gasglow return of The Phantom of the Pantomime had deteriorated into guerrilla warfare, skirmishes in the undergrowth of ever-changing script pages, rewritten scenes, and personal grievances.
Pantomime rehearsal times are the shortest in the business; sometimes the cast, the chorus, and the musicians have a two-week window to tighten up a two-hour show. In our privileged case, the framing device that elevated the show at least halfway in the direction of dramatic art conferred upon us the prestige of legitimate theater with a five-month rehearsal window that gave Float leave to make us repeat every scene, every gag, every kinked eyebrow and knitted lip until it became instinctual, unconscious.
Having lost our original Aladdin, the “radiant” Gwen Skillicorn, to “schedule clashes” with higher-profile gigs than this extravagant labor of self-loathing in a perpetually drizzling post-industrial scab of a city, we had three months left to master the art of pantomime with several new and rubbery-raw cast members.
Otherwise, we’d assembled most of the original cast the way you’d summon relatives to a family funeral, and they’d responded with much the same enthusiasm.
You’ll have to excuse me: I’ve some touching up to do—talking too much. Giving it all away.
Rules of the Glamour: The face I put on is more real than the one I conceal.
Which brings me back to—
Can we try that over again?
The first four hundred times I heard Dominick (with a k) Float repeat his go-to mantra, I had Herr Float diagnosed as one of those addictive types you see on TV—can we do it again and again, and again and again? OCD. A packed and organized fridge of a man. I imagined him bringing this one simple directive to every area of his married life, especially after watching him tackle a full English breakfast by inhaling it.
Cuckoos cuckoo, pigeons coo, parrots they parrot; and so too Dominick Float, singing his own individual, reliable song.
Can we try that over again?
Please reset to the end of the last scene—Float’s production manager interpreted for him.
In the early days of our production, Float could squeeze between the tines of a dessert fork, but that was before success on Broadway, translated into doughnuts and five-course dinners, encouraged him to triple his mass, like the lead character in a remake of The Fly, where, instead of a loathsome insect, the scientist is turning into a hot-air balloon. I know I shouldn’t go on about his weight the way I do, but I saw it as my duty to stand in the way of a potential cardiac extinction event.
Now, I realize I’m painting a less-than-flattering picture of a man I’ve often seen described as a genius, but first impressions are important. You’ll get to know him better as I go on and try as you might to judge him harshly, you’ll wind up like the rest of us, forgiving Float his idiosyncrasies.
Think of this as your last chance to hate him at first sight.
Can we try that over again?
“That” was our first clumsy stagger-through of an early scene in Twankey’s Laundry where Abanazar insinuates himself into the Widow’s confidence by pretending to be a long-lost brother-in-law.
She’s naturally suspicious until the wizard rattles his purse.
Then again, I do have a terrible memory!—I repeated the line for the fifth time. Why don’t you ask the boys and girls?
Then came the reply:
Is there time for a toilet break first? My prostate’s ringing like the bells of St. Peter’s.
And with that, Gofannon Rhys enters the picture, our slumming Royal Shakespearean television star, sick of a TV sideline playing trustworthy avuncular types, detectives with personal problems, essentially decent widowed ex-soldiers, or eccentric magical uncles. By “toilet break” he meant “booze and pills interlude.”
Rhys had a history of alarming racist outbursts, but was given more leeway than the average extremist on the basis that the brunt of his intolerance and blind hatred was borne by the Mundugumor tribe of what he called “giant pygmies” in equatorial New Guinea. Allegedly some ancestors of the current indigenous population had once casseroled and consumed an intrepid nineteenth-century Rhys forebear and the actor found it impossible to forgive their successors. For this reason, fellow thesps tended to yield the man more rope than he deserved, regarding him less as a bigot and more an out-and-out madman with a CBE.
His role, like all our roles, was dual: called upon to represent the wizard Abanazar and to bring to life the tormented actor playing the sorcerer in a doomed quest for career redemption.
I know it’s complicated but it’s not that difficult. I’m asking you to pay attention to what’s being said, that’s all. Stop looking at your reflections on phone screens and listen. You’ll be expected to make a big decision after I’m done. It’s important to concentrate on the details.
God is in the details, as they say. Funnily enough, the Devil is too.
It almost makes you think.
You’ll recall Abanazar; he’s our slimy villain responsible for getting things up and running in the prologue to act 1, and it all starts when he raises a stiffie for a certain Magic Lamp in far Cathay, and no wonder: Possession of this Lamp will guarantee Abanazar the absolute eternal power he’s craved since he stopped being a baby.
Thing is, Abanazar has a major problem; being altogether too evil and way too lazy to hunt for the wonder Lamp himself, the self-appointed wizard’s obliged to trick a resourceful and, it must be said, very naïve Chinese Muslim boy named Aladdin into doing his dirty work for him. In this way, the vile sorcerer contributes motivation and provocation, providing the inciting incident that supplies our transcultural urchin with his heroic prince makeover.
The first table read was a dress-down event; my days of turning up for rehearsals in full drag were, in true pantomime tradition, behind me. There’s medical evidence to suggest I should have stopped wearing tight jeans that year, when I realized to my horror I was a fifty-year-old man with the sperm count of a mummified pharaoh, but you know how it is; self-identifying as an artist means you can dress any way you want, especially when you’re too old to be serious. And who needs children?
Go bold when you’re old—I always say. I feel it’s vital to give youngsters some positive role models for their own disgraceful, inevitable dotage.
When I decide to clamber aboard the number 34 bus looking like Marie Antoinette has risen from the grave dressed as a three-ring vampire monkey circus, that’s my prerogative. It’s performance art. That’s what I tell myself over and over. You could say it’s my mantra, my personal “Can we try that over again?” My plea. My excuse.
The car-crash shambles taking place at the table read that day might have eventually, conceivably succumbed to identification by police pathologists as a clumsy stab in the vague direction of performance but only an expert could tell.
As to art, the killer had made off with it, leaving only a crude chalk outline.
You know we can try all of it again from the start, Dom—I said. We’ve just proved that fourteen times already!
My hydrochloric bon-mot triggered a nervous laugh from the rest of the cast, including the aforementioned Gofannon Rhys, stand-up comedian Dez Blue as the Genie, pretty, self-obsessed soap star Dayanita Jayashankar as Jasmine, and our sweet Molly Stocking playing Aladdin himself as a rabbit flash-frozen in the headlights of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.
Bringing up the rear we’d found gainful employment for musical theater and panto veteran May Tang-Taylor and online lip-syncing “influencer” Aiysha Dyce as, respectively, the Empress, mother to Jasmine, and the Slave of the Ring, the wizard Abanazar’s sassy, body-positive sidekick…
There will come a time, after you’ve settled in, when you’ll ask yourself why the wizard’s so eager to get hold of the Lamp when he already has a magical being at his beck. Honestly, your guess is as good as mine. I suppose it’s the difference between a roller skate and a Rolls-Royce, or a gecko and Godzilla.
We began again, reincarnating spirits spooled and looped backward up the page where every line is delivered as déjà vu.
As far as I was concerned, it was all about getting away with it. I still had my extravagantly long legs to see me through. Otherwise, the utility belt I’d accumulated around the midriff would quickly succumb first to the corset maker’s art, thereafter to a punishing diet of vodka tonics, hot rocket, and sulf.
Where the Dame role is traditionally played by an older man in drag, Principal Boy is a part reserved for young women masquerading as handsome princes. It’s best not to question the arbitrary rules, I’ve found. Just play along; it’s more rewarding, and truer to life.
The dyed blonde, whose idea of dress-down was a paparazzi-baiting ensemble crafted from yellow neon rubber and murdered marmosets, was the previously mentioned Molly Stocking, one of five alleged entertainers in a manufactured girl group called Pussyfever.
When I say “manufactured,” I’m talking unskilled labor struggling under punishing conditions to construct a band using human flotsam and hair extensions. They’d visited a string of hits on the unsuspecting world five or six years back, or so she kept reminding us.
How many hits could the poor world take before it staggered and fell clutching a burst and bloody nose, begging for mercy? I asked her.
She smiled, no idea what I was talking about.
Ever since the quintet’s semi-acrimonious, alarmingly amoebic division into five individually talentless cells eighteen months previously, our Molly had doggedly slogged across a hit-free wasteland that seemed to stretch, or so she confided in me, all the way upstream to an inevitable reunion tour occurring just in time for the band to look as if their mothers had replaced them onstage.
Molly was a good-looking girl of twenty-five, proud possessor of a face so swollen with chemicals and fillers it should have belonged to a matronly MILF trying and failing by a whisker to resemble a twenty-eight-year-old porno star. Much of the work had been performed free of charge by unqualified doctors and nurses at a clinic in Turkey, in exchange for aggressive social media promotion, but honestly the project looked most likely to crash with gruesome results against the rocks of Molly’s early thirties.
It seems like so many of the young girls these days have that identikit face bolted on: filtered self-denying “selfie” cheekbones and fish lips. A “rich girl” mask you can’t remove without specialist tools and years of PTSD.
Deny it if you can: Everybody’s in drag, nowadays, especially the girls.
No surprise then, given her pedigree, that Molly’s true talent lay in an unerring superpower, a bat-sonar that guided her directly to the flat troughs or sharp peaks surrounding every note she aimed toward.
As for Molly’s dancing, let’s just say it was Seven Veils short of Salome and leave it at that.
I’m working as hard as I can not to be mean. This is me trying, honestly, and to be fair, no one could deny Molly looked the part after they nailed her into that streetwise Aladdin outfit, all gilded turban and Day-Glo enameled Nikes.
I was there for the fitting; she looked fantastic in her costume. She’d aced the audition. We knew she could handle it.
Now here she was, losing her figurative handbag in rehearsal. Some performers are like that: Take away the audience feedback, they can’t remember why they clambered out of bed in the first place.
At the time of the table read, Molly was between two men, and not for the first or last time, I shouldn’t wonder. Her current beau, Olympic triathlon bronze medalist Vladimir Orbit, was too tame, or so she explained; too clean and too sober. Orbit, a paragon of decency and athletic accomplishment, was bad for Molly’s new image as a wild and dangerous party girl on the rebound.
With that story line in mind, Molly’s publicists lined her up with fellow pop casualty Joss Weill, the proto-human, third-favorite vocalist of Boystalking, swaying and blinking like Piltdown Man in the orts of his solo career.
They’d shack up together, that was the idea. They’d plan a wedding, then she’d catch him red-handed with a trans pole dancer, or some rival pop cast-off. Preferably younger. Another love rat exposed. Named, shamed, and binned.
It’s not worth the energy it takes to stay in the drag race. The same showbiz shock stories play out with different names, like actors doing Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, or Hamlet. I should know.
Molly’s representation was keen to get her back “on top,” as she put it. They might as well have put her on top of a bonfire like what’s his name, Guy Fawkes, or Joan of Arc.
Where’s that boy? Aladdin?
I floated the line a second time, setting it free to roam the otherwise empty stage.
As I lingered in vain for Molly’s response, I could hear papers shuffled and throats cleared, thinking how that was probably the precise sound of things right before the Big Bang and the beginning of the Universe.
Aladdin?—there’s me lobbing the cue back, the ball in a game of solo tennis.
The Principal Boy is the lynchpin of the pantomime, they say—we rely on the audience to buy wholeheartedly into the boy hero’s simple story, allowing us to drape our madcap theatrical razzmatazz over a time-honored clotheshorse of narrative familiarity.
I’d seen Molly on the front page of one of the gossip rags that morning on my way to work—Hey You! or Scorch or Close Enough! or whatever they’re called. A glum-looking photograph of the girl, whey-faced with minimal makeup and three double chins, on the phone. The headline:
WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT ME TO FAIL?
Float, raised and educated by cynical sophisticates, instructed us all to draw upon those bottomless wells of self-deception and hubris we actors bring to the stage. Naturalism est verboten—artifice, fakery, illusion, decadence: These are our watchwords.
Float had already anticipated the delicious layers of irony he might peel back by casting an untrained actress in a pivotal, leading role.
When we lost our first-run Aladdin, the talented, insufferable Gwen Skillicorn, to Hollywood, Float worked hard to convince himself that Molly’s coquettish naïveté or, as I saw it, her superhuman lack of charm and talent, would win the day. Her tabloid fame, he reasoned, would be sufficient to lure a new “hip” under-thirty audience to our revival of The Phantom.
He was both right and wrong in every way.
I took Molly aside.
I don’t know why it’s not working—she said.
You’re letting them discourage you. You beat off lots of young women to secure this role—I told her—and I know!
Try as I might, it’s hard to stem the tidal bore of innuendo released by my inner Twankey.
I am a tiger!—I growled. Let’s see you snarlin’, darlin’! Remember? You’d come on in tiger-print vinyl outfits. I’m sure it was about tigers. It went to number three in the charts, right?
“Tigress”—she reminded me, with a pointed emphasis on the final syllable that conjured up the hissing asp that did for Cleopatra.
I didn’t think they let you say that nowadays—I cautioned. I’ve been on the sharp end of political correctness often enough! Nobody says “actress” anymore, and it’s the same thing.
It was a song about feminism—argued Molly, putting her foot down.
Even better—I assured her, refusing to take the bait. Now do what I do, and you won’t ever forget your lines again.
So began the eye-to-eye transmission of simple folk wisdom.
Here’s the plan—I said. When I read the lines, I’m already wearing my costume. Think about the turban, the waistcoat, and the pantaloons—you’re wearing them right now. The curly slippers. Not the sort of outfit pop star Molly Stocking would wear, am I right? More like something Aladdin would wear.
She nodded, baffled into wonder.
When you’re in costume, you stop being you; you become Aladdin. Aladdin has problems of his own, but they never change, night after night, and he turns them all into opportunities. You can do the same.
I sensed the beginnings of what you might call a paradigm shift, a shuffle of mental plate tectonics capable of rearranging the conceptual ground beneath her feet. I thought back to the magazine headlines I’d read earlier that grim Tuesday.
You know why everyone wants you to fail, babes?
Because they hate me!—she wailed.
They’re evil, jealous bastards!—I explained, patiently. You’re young and beautiful and they’re old or ugly and unsatisfied with their lives or they want to take your place. They think you have everything they wish for. They think you don’t know how to be sad like they do! What else did you think it was? Why you’d want to entrust your self-esteem to some gang of evil jealous bastards is a problem for you to tackle with a qualified professional.
