My Life: The Musical (10 page)

Why Broadway Shows Should Be Free
A Persuasive Essay by Emily Pearl
Second Draft

Broadway shows are wonderful, but to pay a hundred dollars for a ticket is too much. What if a person has to buy food? Or pay rent? Or is perhaps too young to have a job? Even so, such people might love to see a Broadway musical, and don’t they have the right? I think Broadway shows should be free for all. Here’s how it could be accomplished.

First, the producers should stop charging money for tickets.

Second,

Third—

And in conclusion, that is how Broadway shows could be free.

Those pesky middle paragraphs. The problem was
how
. A few hours’ research had only confirmed Mr. Henderson’s objections. Not only were millions of dollars required to get a show to opening night, but keeping it running cost a staggering sum every week.

For some reason Emily couldn’t fathom, this number was called the “nut.” The nut included the cost of renting the theatre, salaries for the actors, musicians and stagehands, the weekly advertising budget, the royalties that were paid to the creative team—the list went on and on. (Emily suddenly wondered how much it cost to replenish the fake flower petals for
Aurora
’s curtain call. The tiny circles of pink and red tissue paper had rained down on her scores of times, but it hadn’t previously occurred to her that they cost money.)

For some reason Emily couldn’t fathom, this number was called the “nut.” The nut included the cost of renting the theatre, salaries for the actors, musicians and stagehands, the weekly advertising budget, the royalties that were paid to the creative team—the list went on and on. (Emily suddenly wondered how much it cost to replenish the fake flower petals for
Aurora
’s curtain call. The tiny circles of pink and red tissue paper had rained down on her scores of times, but it hadn’t previously occurred to her that they cost money.)

As if this weren’t discouraging enough, Emily also discovered that Broadway theatres had something called a
capacity
. That was a fancy way of saying the theatre only had so many seats (the Rialto had 1,545, to be exact). A Broadway musical played eight shows a week; union rules forbade adding any more.

Emily even wrote it out mathematically (Philip would have been so impressed):

(# of seats)
×
(8 performances a week)
×
(ticket
price) = maximum amount of money any show could
make per week

The number of seats couldn’t go up, the number of performances couldn’t go up—Emily was no math whiz, but even she could see that the only thing that
could
go up was the ticket price.

Emily ripped the notes for her paper out of her notepad and crushed them into a crinkly yellow ball. If, by giving this assignment, Mr. Henderson had wanted to demonstrate that facts had the power to persuade, he’d done it. Emily was persuaded: there was no way Broadway shows could be free. As far as she could tell, it was nearly impossible for them to be produced at all.

Philip also awoke on Sunday with an uneasy feeling. Even in the abstract, the stop clause concept was causing him no end of discomfort. He didn’t like the idea behind it: everything could seem fine, life was putt-putting along without any significant bumps in the road, and then—one moment of weakness or inattention or plain bad luck and goodbye, Charlie, as Emily’s Grandma Rose liked to say.

He took out his
Aurora
spreadsheets and tried to calm himself with numbers. But his mind kept racing back in time to that awful day three years before when he’d sat at this very table, listening to his mother’s end of a phone conversation that contained the following information: his father was getting remarried only six months after moving out—the minute the divorce was final, basically—and he and his new garlic-farming wife would be relocating to the other side of the continent of North America immediately following the wedding. . . .

After the phone call Mrs. Nebbling locked herself in her bedroom, and Mark yelled a few choice swear words he’d learned from Grand Theft Auto. Then he stormed out to spend the night at a friend’s house.

Alone, ignored, abandoned, thirteen-year-old Philip couldn’t hold still—he paced around the living room, which was still piled high with unpacked boxes (they had just moved into Birchwood Gardens, and they were all trying not to mention how much smaller it was than their old house). He shoved his hands into his pockets and took them out again. He literally felt like he might explode.

So he swiped the grocery money from the glass jar on the kitchen counter, walked at top speed with his head down the whole way to the train station, and headed into the city on his own, which he’d started doing since his father left. Rules and limits didn’t seem to apply anymore.

He bought his ticket on the train, which cost extra, but he didn’t care. He half ran from Penn Station to Times Square, and then, as the razor edge of his mood finally began to soften, he walked up to the first box office window he saw and bought what turned out to be the very last available ticket to the very first public performance of a new musical called
Aurora
. . . .

“Dude!” Mark slapped a greasy pizza box right on top of Philip’s papers. “I made you some lunch. Bon appétit!”

“Gross,” Philip said, snatching his spreadsheets away before they were ruined. “I’m not hungry.”

“Watching your figure for the ladies, huh? Have you kissed that Emily yet?” Mark made noisy kissy lips.

“Would you please just die?” Philip retorted. “Emily and I are just friends, I keep telling you that. Do you kiss your friends?”

“ ‘Just friends!’ I rest my case, Your Honor. The ‘just friends’ alibi is Exhibit Gay,
Philip Nebbling versus the State of Denial.
” Mark grabbed a hot slice out of the box and took a big, cheesy bite. The stink of garlic hit Philip like a slap. “ ‘Just friends,’ ” Mark said, the sauce dripping down his chin. “That’s a good one.”

Thankfully, this unpleasant conversation was interrupted by the little snippet of “Never Be Enough” Philip had made into his IM alarm:

Never be enough,
My love for you could
Never be enough . . .

It was Emily, summoning him to the computer for three o’clock, Sunday matinee time. He and Emily would chat online and play the overture together and Philip would feel much better.

Philip moved a pile of dirty laundry from the chair to the floor and sat down in front of the screen.

AURORAROX
: hey

AURORAROX
: u there?

AURORAROX
: u have to be there u have to be there, pleeeeeeeze

BwayPhil
: Okay! Relax, I’m here.

AURORAROX
: OMG! have you seen the message boards?

BwayPhil
: No, what’s going on?

AURORAROX
: OMG OMG you have to look

BwayPhil
: Which one?

AURORAROX
: all of them

AURORAROX
: just look

AURORAROX
: i’ll wait

With a few clicks Philip got the
TheatreGeeks.com
message boards open on his screen.

Something’s closing, did you hear?

I heard something long-running

I heard it might be a stop clause situation—

That stinks, producers are such greedy bullies

Yeah but there wouldn’t be any shows without them . . .

He switched to a different message board.

I think it’s phantom

probably, that’s been running 4ever

still sells out though, who’d kick out phantom?

Well it’s not “lion king”

No, you still can’t get tickets to lion king—

That was
BroadwayDish.com
. There were dozens of these sites; Philip had all the big ones bookmarked.

Where’d you hear?

I read it on
ThespNet.com

I read it on
BackstageGossip.com
I heard it from a friend in the business—she’s in the chorus of Mamma Mia, she heard it from her friend who’s the assistant stage manager at Avenue Q who got it from his friend who’s the swing for Hairspray—

What did he say?!!!

Only that it’s a show no one would expect, the theatre owner is closing on a technicality to make room for something else

Something even bigger

but no one knows what

Philip’s heart was beating very fast. His ears suddenly filled with a horrible, piercing, high-pitched sound.

AURORAROX
: p, you there?

AURORAROX
: ?

BwayPhil
: Sorry, back now!

BwayPhil
: Mark burned PopTarts & the smoke alarms went off.

BwayPhil
: I had to go yank out all the batteries to shut them up.

AURORAROX
: oh

AURORAROX
: so did you see

BwayPhil
: I did.

AURORAROX
: it makes me so nervous

AURORAROX
: what if it’s true after all

AURORAROX
: what lester said about aurora

AURORAROX
: and the stupid stupid stop clause—

BwayPhil
: Hang on now—

BwayPhil
: Has it occurred to you that maybe WE started this rumor?

AURORAROX
: ?

BwayPhil
: Remember? There were those guys in Don’t Tell Mama.

BwayPhil
: Maybe they heard us talking.

BwayPhil
: Or maybe somebody saw Morris limping.

BwayPhil
: Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.

BwayPhil
: Okay?

AURORAROX
: okay

AURORAROX
: maybe . . .

12

“A BOOK REPORT ON PETER RABBIT”

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

1967 (Off-Broadway), 1971 (Broadway).
Music, lyrics, and book by Clark Gesner

Monday was a dark day.

In the theatre a “dark day” meant it was the actors’ day off, there was no performance, the theatre was “dark.”

In real life, of course, a dark day was one that was full of dread and despair. It was the day on which you would be required to turn in a long-overdue paper you have not, for the most part, written. A day when there was nothing but cold pizza for breakfast, since your brother’s definition of the five food groups was pizza, Fritos, salsa, more pizza, and Red Bull.

Above all, a dark day was one in which the thing that gave your life meaning and purpose, the ritual that filled your Saturday afternoons with music and your tender heart with joy, might or might not be threatened with oblivion, and there was no way to find out for sure.

Monday was a dark day indeed.

Even Marlena Ortiz was having a bad day. . . .

“Thank you for all your concern!” Marlena Ortiz typed. The blog format made it look like the thumbnail-sized head shot of her on the screen was talking, and the picture seemed so happy and carefree that she was often tempted to write really nasty things coming out of its mouth. She didn’t, of course. Marlena had worked awfully hard to get this far; she wasn’t about to screw it up.

Marlena typically spent twenty minutes a day posting on the official
Aurora
blog. She answered questions from fans and slipped them thrilling tidbits of personal info (“Hey, I’m from the Bronx too!”). When she was pressed for time, she’d make sure to post a “hello” message so “her people” knew she’d at least logged on to read their gushing. Her contract didn’t require it, but the Aurorafans loved it.
Aurora
had been good to Marlena and she believed in being a good sport in return.

“Everything is fine,” she typed. “Don’t worry about all the rumors, Broadway’s full of them! AURORA is still here and still going strong, see you tomorrow at eight!”

As she sat there, the comments and questions kept piling up on the
Aurora
blog, and Marlena finally allowed herself to wonder:
Is it us?
Could
Aurora
be closing? There’d been rumors before, but never anything like this.