“It depends on rights, you know. It could be very expensive.”
“It’s not,” Perri said. “I checked.”
The students knew that the decision, ultimately, was Giff’s. If he wanted Gypsy, he would somehow get the votes he needed. But perhaps he was swayed by Perri’s passion. Or maybe he was enchanted with the idea of staging a show that no Baltimore-area high school had ever attempted. Perri was a senior, and this would be her last musical. She had earned her star turn.
But he could not give her quite everything she wanted. He told her at callbacks that the part she longed for, the starchy Nurse Fay Apple, was not right for her. Perri was good at the starchy side, much less persuasive when she had to play the character’s alter ego, a sexy French actress. He gave Perri the part of Mayoress Cora, while making Kat Hartigan the nurse.
Under Giff’s usual rules, Kat Hartigan should not have gotten a lead at all. She had not tried out for a single show during her years at Glendale, despite repeated encouragement from the chorus teacher, who admired her pure soprano voice. It was clear to everyone that Kat’s sudden interest in the fall musical was all about sweetening her college applications, adding yet one more extracurricular to her résumé.
But Kat’s voice was strong and she was fetching, as Old Giff was heard to say to the band director. She wasn’t quite as fiery as she needed to be in the angry scenes, but Giff worked to bring that side out of her in rehearsals. Certainly her seduction of Dr. Hapgood was almost too credible. The only thing that was hard to believe was that someone as womanly as Kat Hartigan would really be drawn to the reedy, immature junior cast opposite her. That was the perennial problem with high-school shows. Most of the girls looked grown-up, while the boys were still skinny and unformed.
They were three weeks into rehearsals when the complaints started. Several parents found the show unsuitable, saying it was much too dark for high-school students. And what was the bit about communism, not to mention the exchange about taxes and nuclear weapons? It didn’t seem quite patriotic, did it, given that the United States had thousands of troops in Iraq? The show encouraged a disdain for authority and a distrust of government. Were those values they wanted to endorse?
No one suspected Dale Hartigan of making these arguments. After all, his daughter had the second lead. But Josie heard from Perri that it was Mr. Hartigan, working quietly behind the scenes, who was determined the show would not go on. The rumor was that Mr. Hartigan’s real beef was the mildly suggestive lyrics that Kat had to sing, “Come Play Wiz Me. ” Old Giff argued that she did it so freshly and prettily that it worked for the show in a wholly unanticipated way, underscoring the fact that the sexy French actress was Nurse Fay Apple in disguise. Still, when it was learned that an Equity company in Harrisburg was invoking the 150-mile radius and forcing Glendale to cancel its production of Anyone Can Whistle, gossip continued to blame Dale Hartigan.
Instead of canceling the fall musical, Giff chose Oklahoma!, because he could stage it in his sleep, and he gave Kat the lead. And all the drama students could see that the part of a sweet-but-stubborn Oklahoma farm girl suited her far better than did a two-sided temptress.
They all assumed that Perri would play Ado Annie, every girl’s dream role. But while a dozen girls had been called back for the part in the rushed-up audition process necessitated by the switch, Perri was not among them. She simply refused, and the absence of the obvious favorite stirred up a froth of longing and yearning that verged on hysteria. By the end of the audition, girls were weeping, on crying jags so intense that they had to bring in the guidance counselor, Alexa Cunningham, to calm them down. One girl cried and vomited until blood vessels burst at the bottom of her eyes, leaving her with the red-rimmed pout of a lesser monster on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She got the part, too, although it was hard not to wonder what Perri might have done with it.
Choosing the male leads should have been blissfully anticlimactic after that sobfest, but Perri threw Giff another curveball by showing up, breasts bound, and demanding a chance to try out for the part of Jud, the lovelorn ranch hand who turns violent at the play’s end.
“C’mon, Perri,” Old Giff said, treating Perri as if she were playing a practical joke. “That just can’t be.”
“But you’re the one who’s always talking about how unusual casting can make people see an old play in a new way, remember? You loved it when the Shakespeare Theater in Washington did Othello with a white actor as the lead and a black actor as Iago.”
“This is different.”
“I don’t see how. There needs to be something truly forbidden about Jud’s love for Laurey. When the play was first produced, they got that over with his love for dirty postcards. But those things seem pretty innocuous now. I wouldn’t play him as a girl, but the fact that I am a girl would inject that sense of menace that Jud’s character has lost over the years.”
“The songs are written for a baritone.”
“We perform with a piano, not an orchestra. It wouldn’t be hard to transpose the songs to a suitable key for me.”
As it turned out, there was something chilling about Perri’s version of “Lonely Room,” and a comic poignancy in her version of “Pore Jud Is Daid.” All the students who saw that audition knew that no boy in the school could touch her subtle performance. But even in the allegedly hate-free zones of Glendale High School, there were boundaries. If Dale Hartigan had been troubled by the idea of his daughter in a negligee, singing suggestively about her own body, how would he react to a girl-even a girl disguised as a boy-singing a love song to Kat?
Old Giff told Perri that she simply wasn’t large enough to create the physical threat that Jud needed to convey. She settled for the part of Gertie, a small but showy part, and Giff cast a wonderful baritone from the school chorus as Jud. This boy’s mother also complained, accusing Giff of perpetrating old stereotypes by having an African-American boy pine for a blue-eyed blonde.
Given all this drama, it was several weeks before anyone noticed that Perri wasn’t speaking to Kat, not outside their scenes together. She would deliver her lines with her usual professionalism but retreat between scenes, seeking as much distance as she could from Kat, giggling with Dannon, the wardrobe manager. And if Kat spoke to her offstage, Perri openly snubbed her.
Old Giff summoned Josie, who had signed up for dance troupe as she always did. It meant spending more time with Kat and Perri, and the dancers always needed someone little to throw around in the dance numbers.
“What gives?” he asked. “Is Perri mad at Kat because Whistle got canceled? Because it really had nothing to do with Dale Hartigan, no matter what everyone thinks.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” said Josie, who had asked Kat and Perri the same thing. But she asked them again, only to receive the same nonanswers.
“Ask Kat,” Perri said. “If she’ll tell you.”
“Perri’s just moody,” Kat said. “I didn’t do anything.”