Chapter 11
Finally Joey sorted the tape and the fairies managed to go through their dance, although the parents still laughed at bits of it. Theodora sulked and wouldn’t go back on which made their numbers a bit uneven for the weaving bit.
They got a big clap and I rushed backstage to strip off the glittery dress piece and go on again as Ophelia.
Simon looked very impressive as Hamlet. He strode out onto the stage and people were actually quiet for a change. I sank down by his feet, which was not hard, as my legs had pretty much gone all wobbly by that stage of the proceedings. I was thankful for the rest. Simon began;
‘To be, or not to be: that ith the quethtion:’
Then the ghosts all came in and started clanking and moaning while Aaron turned the spooky music and strobe lights on. Simon rushed off the stage and complained bitterly to Ms Cutter. There was a bit of shouting before the strobe lights went off again, followed by the ghosts. Simon came back onto the stage looking sanctimonious and started again.
‘To be, or not to be: that ith the quethtion:’
Half the ghosts came on again, egged on by Brian who was desperate to drown Simon out, and were dragged off hastily by the other half who were terrified of Ms Cutter and what she would do to them afterwards. The audience all laughed and some of the little kids started calling out for the ghosts to come back.
Simon glared offstage at the ghosts and started again. This time he got as far as,
‘to thuffer the thlings and arrowth of outrageouth fortune.’
Unfortunately Brian kept hissing ‘sss’ at him every time Simon came to an ‘S,’ which he said afterwards was just to be helpful. The audience thought this was great, and enthusiastically joined in the hissing for the rest of the speech.
Simon stood it until he got to; ‘Mutht give us pauthe,’ then stormed off the stage in a huff. I got up to follow him and half the ghosts bumped into me as the strobe lights went on again. They reckoned they couldn’t see very well in the sheets but one of them, I’m sure it was Ty, pinched my bottom so I slapped him. The audience didn’t care. By that time they laughed at whatever we did.
The ghosts got a really good clap for their sequence then it was time for the witches’ scene. Now that did go well, about the only thing that went the way it was supposed to. The witches carried on a really realistic looking cauldron which was actually Angela’s mother’s preserving pan. The witches walked around the cauldron chanting;
‘Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw’
They threw in bits of plastic bag and lumps of play-dough and other things that looked really disgusting but were actually quite okay really.
They all muttered;
‘Double, double toil and trouble:
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’
They’d practised their cackling and it was really effective. No one laughed and a couple of the little kids looked quite scared until one of them called out,
‘That’s my big sister Stacey. Hi, Stacey,’ and kept calling out and waving until Stacey waved back which spoilt the effect a bit.
Anyway, they were witching away like mad and I was thinking, ‘thank goodness something is going right,’ while I was changing into my Lady MacBeth outfit. Then Janice wrecked it all by spitting in the cauldron. She said later she’d been carried away by the drama of the moment. But Angela was furious. She yelled,
‘Oh yuck! Oh gross! That is so disgusting. My mother uses this pan for making jam and now I’ll never be able to eat it ever again.’
She shoved Janice, who shoved her back, and the next thing you know they were pulling hair and screaming at each other. The other witches hauled them apart and off the stage but Angela wouldn’t touch the cauldron and kept going on about how it would have to be sterilized before she would go near it again.
I had to go on then, amid all the laughter, to do my Lady MacBeth bit. That’s the part where Lady MacBeth is sleepwalking because she has killed her husband. She keeps trying to wash her hands because she thinks she can still see her husband’s blood on them. I was desperate to do this part well, especially because Jake had arrived backstage.
‘I’ve come to watch you do the breakdancing,’ he said with a grin.
‘What a gorgeous little puppy, isn’t she sweet? Is she yours?’ cooed Bethany, as a little tan and white pup with floppy ears and big brown eyes staggered over and sat down at Jake’s feet. He nodded.
‘Her name’s Jessie, and I can’t leave her in the car because she would howl the place down.’
‘You’d better not let Ms Cutter see her,’ warned Aaron.
‘It’s okay, I’ll, keep her quiet,’ Jake promised.
We all thought Jessie was gorgeous and fought to have a hold of her. We girls all thought Jake was gorgeous as well, so I was hoping he would be impressed with my acting.
Eric was okay as the doctor, which was hardly a dramatically demanding part, although his voice kept breaking in the middle of his sentences so he’d start off deep and end on a squeak. The little kids thought he was doing it on purpose and laughed at him, and he went bright red, which really clashed with his carrot coloured hair. Grace was quite good as the gentlewoman although she spoke her lines really quietly so one of the parents called, ‘Speak up, we can’t hear you,’ from the back of the hall. Grace was so embarrassed after that she only spoke in a whisper. I drew a deep breath as I prepared for my dramatic speech. I was going to give this one all I had. I turned towards the audience and called,
‘Out damned spot! Out I say!’
There was a yelp and a shout from the wings and Jake’s puppy rushed onto the stage. The puppy ran around me, leaping joyfully at my outstretched hands, obviously thinking I was holding a dog biscuit.
‘What’s she doing here? Get her off,’ I muttered through gritted teeth at Brian, trying to look soulful and dramatic at the same time.
Brian called from the wings, ‘Sorry, Chelsea. I think someone has undone her lead accidentally. Just keep going.’
So I continued.
‘Out damned spot! Out I say!’
One of Rangi’s cousins called out, ‘That’s not Spot, that’s Jessie,’ and the audience went all hysterical again.
I kept saying, ‘Out damned spot!’ and looking desperately at the wings hoping that Brian would do the decent thing and come on and grab her. But the puppy was becoming more and more excited and leapt all over me and started trying to lick my face. Jake got the biggest cheer of the night when he came on stage to pick her up, as I think his entire whanau was there. We stumbled through the rest of the scene somehow.
Next it was As You Like It where we were doing the lip-synching to the rap music.
Everyone crowded onto the stage and Joey put the tape on for us. Now the words were really simple. They were basically the last two lines of the Duke’s speech;
Play music! And you brides and bridegrooms all
With measure heap’d in joy, to the measures fall.
But I’d made them a bit more modern;
Play music! Now you b-boys and b-girls all
Move to the funky beat, hip-hop one and all
Okay, so it wasn’t that great! I was so miffed at having to put words to Mike’s music that I hadn’t tried very hard. I know I should have had something different instead of using ‘all’ twice but no one cared. So we stood there and the music started and it was the wrong tape.
‘Where did that come from? Have you been messing round with the tape?’ Joey asked Rangi.
‘Wasn’t me, mate.’ Rangi shook his head. Joey turned around to look for Janice, who was sulking behind the scenery on the other side of the stage. The rest of us didn’t care. Suddenly we had this fantastic Hip-Hop music blaring out. Jason said, ‘Right on.’
‘Awesome,’ agreed Ty and everyone rushed out to the front of the stage and started breaking. I was supposed to take off my long dress and just have my jeans on at this point but I couldn’t get
the laces untied, as they seemed to be in a knot. So after a few minutes of struggling I gave up. The parents were stunned as they heard the words – I guess there probably were an awful lot of swear words on it. It didn’t worry us but I could see some of the mothers were rushing over to cover their little kids’ ears.
Finally Ms Cutter ran back stage, and pulled the plug from the amplifier, and hissed at me, ‘Do the epilogue quickly, Chelsea.’
So I stepped forward and launched into the epilogue;
‘It is not the fashion to see the lady, the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that...’
At that point my worst nightmare came true and my braces locked together. I think one of the wires on my top teeth must have come loose when I fell off the balcony and it caught on the bottom braces. Ms Cutter kept glaring at me from the side of the stage and the rest of the class started tittering as I desperately tried to force the words through my clenched teeth. I struggled through a bit more of it,
‘If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ‘tis true that a good play needs no epilogue;’ only it sounded like ‘Uh uh ee ooh at oog eye ee o ooh, uh ooh ah a ooh ay ee oh e ee oh.’
It was so hard to get the words out that I had to sort of grunt them, and Malcolm told me afterwards that I sounded just like our pig at feeding time.
I decided that I had done well and truly enough, as the audience was still treating me like some type of comedy routine, and some people were practically falling off their seats. I stepped forward and ground out the last line
‘when I make curtsey, bid me farewell.’
As I said ‘farewell,’ I stepped forward to sink into a graceful curtsey. Unfortunately I tripped over my long skirt where the tacked up hem had come undone during the breakdancing and with a yell I fell flat on my face. The only good thing was that the jolt jarred my braces apart again so I could talk. The class cheered and laughed and the audience laughed and clapped and I wished the floor would open up and swallow me, I was so embarrassed. It had to be the worst moment of my life.
Then the headmaster came onto the stage and held his hand up for silence.
‘Well done, class,’ he said. ‘That was a Comedy of Errors but All’s Well that End’s Well.’ All the parents and senior kids who knew their Shakespeare groaned at this.
We listened in open-mouthed astonishment, as he went on to say, ‘While you have rather taken liberties with Shakespeare’s works, the bard himself was famed for his bawdy humour and would probably have enjoyed your performance.’
We couldn’t believe it. I thought we would have been in so much trouble for stuffing it up so badly but all the parents said at the end that they had never laughed so much in their lives before. Even Ms Cutter was smirking and pretending that she had organised it to turn out that way. Mr Micklejohn made me shudder by asking me later what comedy production I was planning for next year but he said very encouraging things to my parents about my ‘potential.’ That ought to be good for at least a week of getting out of doing the dishes.
Sarah came up to me when I was getting changed. She said she’d watched it from the back with her mother.
‘You were excellent, Chelsea. I wouldn’t have been able to do it nearly so well.’
‘Everyone laughed,’ I said accusingly. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be funny.’
‘But it was, it was hilarious,’ spluttered Sarah. ‘I loved the bit where you pretended to fall off the balcony.’
I tried to explain that I hadn’t been pretending but Sarah wasn’t listening.
She admitted that she had laughed all the way through, particularly at the fairies, who she felt were long overdue for a good setback. She knew quite well that their bit wasn’t supposed to be a comedy routine.
All the class said they’d enjoyed doing the production, all except Gemma and Theodora, but they never talk to me much anyway. Some of the boys had disappeared and I think there was a fight going on outside behind the bike sheds. But quite a few kids crowded around me.
Brian said,
‘It’s thanks to you, Chelsea, that we’ve done so well.’
‘And it was neat fun, too,’ agreed Grace.
‘Yeah,’ beamed Janice. ‘My parents are really impressed with me.’
‘Mine too,’ chimed in Stacey.
I said, ‘Don’t thank me. Thank Sarah. After all, if it wasn’t for Sarah we would never have done it.’
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