"Seems to me there are at least two stage versions of 'Beauty and the Beast'
out there, aren't there?" Angus suggested. "He'd be a natural."
"Wouldn't work," I said, shaking my head. "Too many lines. Too much real acting."
"How about a non-speaking role, then?" Fogerty suggested. "Maybe a walk-on part?"
I snorted. "Would you travel a three hundred light-years for a walk-on part?"
A muscle in his jaw twitched. "No, I suppose not," he conceded. "I suppose that also lets out any chance of using him as part of the set decoration."
"It does," I agreed. "Which leaves only one approach, at least only one I can think of. We're going to have to have a play written especially for him."
Fogerty waved a hand. "Of course," he said, as if it had been obvious all along.
"Well. The phone's over there—better get busy."
"What, you mean now?" I asked, looking at my watch. "It's after one in the morning."
"New York is the city that never sleeps, isn't it?" he countered, jabbing a finger at the phone. "Besides, we need to get this on track. Go on, start punching."
There were six New York playwrights with whom I had at least a passing acquaintance. The first five numbers I tried shunted me to answering machines or services. My sixth try, to Mark Skinner, actually went through. "Mr. Skinner, this is Adam Lebowitz," I said. "I don't know if you remember me, but I was assistant set designer when your play Catch the Rainbow was at the Marquis. I'm the one—"
"Oh, sure," he interrupted. "You're the one who came up with that rotating chandelier/staircase gizmo, weren't you? That was a snazzy trick—tell you the truth, I was damned if I could see how that was going to work when I wrote it into the play. So what's up?"
"I'm currently attached to the State Department group in charge of escorting the Fuzhtian ambassador around," I said. "We're—"
"Oh, yeah, sure—Lebowitz. Yeah, I remember seeing you in the background in one of those TV shots. Couldn't place you at the time—that was you in the brown suit and Fedora sort of thing, right? Sure. So what's up?"
"The ambassador wants to be in a Broadway play," I told him. "We need you to write it for him."
There was a long silence. "You what?"
"We need you to write a play for him," I repeated.
"Ah," he said. "Uh... yeah. Well... can he act?"
"I don't know," I said. "Oh, and the only translator he brought with him prints everything he says in rebus pictures."
"Uh-huh. And you're sure he really wants to do this?"
"We think so. He climbed up on the stage at the St. James tonight and started singing from 'How to Succeed.' "
Mark digested that. "So you're wanting a musical?"
"I don't think it really matters," I said. "Fuzhtian singing voices seem to be the same as their speaking ones, except a lot louder. Might help with stage projection, but otherwise it's not going to make much difference."
"Yeah," Mark said. "And how loud can you make a rebus, anyway? Sure, I'll take a
crack at it. How soon do you need this?"
I looked at Fogerty. "He says sure, and how soon."
"Tell him two days."
I goggled. "What?"
"Two days." Fogerty gestured impatiently at the phone. "Go on, tell him."
I swallowed. "Mr. Fogerty, the head of the delegation, says he needs it in two days."
I don't remember Mark's response to that exactly. I do know it lasted nearly five minutes, covered the complete emotional range from incredulity to outrage and back again, tore apart in minute detail Fogerty's heritage, breeding, intelligence, integrity, and habits, and never once used a single swear word.
Playwrights can be truly awesome sometimes.
Finally, he ran down. "Two days, huh?" he said, sounding winded but much calmer.
"Okay, fine, he's on. You want to tell him what it's going to cost?"
He quoted me a number that would have felt right at home in a discussion of the national debt. I relayed it to Fogerty and had the minor satisfaction of seeing him actually pale a little. For a second I thought he was going to abandon the whole idea, but he obviously realized he wouldn't do any better anywhere else.
So with a pained look on his face he gave a single stiff nod. "He says OK," I told Mark.
"Fine," Mark said, all brisk business now. "I'll have it ready in forty-eight hours. Incidentally, I trust you realize how utterly insane this whole thing is."
Privately, I agreed with him. Publicly, though, I was a company man now. "The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity," I told him.
"I hope you're right," he grunted. "So where do you want the play delivered?" The next two days were an incredible haze of whirlwind chaos. While Fogerty and a skeleton crew escorted the ambassador on a tour of New York, the rest of us worked like maniacs to organize his theatrical debut. There was a theater to hire on a couple of days' notice—no mean feat on Broadway—a complete stage crew to assemble, a casting agent to retain for whatever other parts Mark wrote into this forty-eight-hour wonder, and a hundred other details that needed to get worked out.
To my quite honest astonishment, they all did. We got the Richard Rodgers theater hired for an off-hours matinee, the backstage personnel fell into line like I'd never seen happen, and Mark got his play delivered within two hours of his promised deadline.
The play was a masterpiece in its own unique way: an actual, coherent story completely cobbled together from famous scenes and lines from other plays and movies. Fogerty nearly had an apoplectic fit when he saw it, wondering at the top of his lungs why he should be expected to pay a small fortune for what was essentially a literary retread. I calmed him down by pointing out that (A)
this would allow an obvious entertainment buff like the ambassador to learn his lines with a minimum of rehearsal time, which would get this whole thing over with more quickly and enable us to get out of our overpriced Manhattan hotel and back to the overpriced Washington hotel which the government already had a lease on; and (B) that Mark had even managed to choose scenes and lines that should translate reasonably well on the RebuScope, which would help make the show at least halfway intelligible for the audience. Eventually, Fogerty cooled down.
We met at nine sharp the next morning for the first rehearsal... and, as I should have expected, ran full-bore into our first roadblock.
"What's the problem now?" Fogerty demanded, hovering over Angus like a neurotic mother bird.
"I don't know," Angus replied. "It's the same message that started this whole thing: 'I want to be in a Broadway play.' "
"So he's in one," Fogerty bit out, throwing a glare up at the brightly lit stage. The ambassador was standing motionless in the center, repeating the same message over and over, while the other actors and crew stood nervously watching him, most of them from what they obviously hoped was a safe distance. News of the St. James incident had clearly gotten around.
"I know that, sir," Angus said calmly. "Perhaps he doesn't understand the concept of rehearsals."
Fogerty trotted out the next in line of his exotic curses, sharing this one between the RebuScope and the ambassador himself. "Then you'd better try to explain it to him, hadn't you?" Angus stood up. "I'll try, sir."
"Wait a minute," I said suddenly, leaning over Angus's shoulder. "That doesn't say 'I want to be in a Broadway play.' It says 'I want to be a Broadway play.'"
"What?" Fogerty leaned over Angus's other shoulder.
"There's no 'in' in the message," I explained, pointing. "See? 'Eye w-ant to—'"
"I see what it says," Fogerty snapped. "So what the hell does it mean?"
Angus craned his head to look at me. "Are you suggesting...?"