The Queen Is Dead by Jane Dentinger

Author:Jane Dentinger [Dentinger, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3691-6
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-06-28T16:20:00+00:00

18

“OH MY, DOESN’T SHE look lovely!”

Slipping into the seat next to Gerrard’s, Miriam Barnes sighed blissfully as Belinda made her entrance with a boy who looked familiar to Phillip. It only took him a second to realize Prince Florizel was also the night clerk at his hotel. That connection made, his eyes shot back to the girl. Miriam had good cause to kvell over her daughter; a pretty girl offstage, under the lights Bel was the quintessence of loveliness and youthful grace. So it was no strain at all to concur with Mom.

“Yes, she’s a vision all right.”

“I’m not supposed to be here. Bellie’d have a fit if she knew,” Miriam whispered with guilty excitement. “She didn’t want me to come till opening. But I’ve sneaked into rehearsals once or twice … I just had to see how she was doing.”

Obviously she was doing just fine in her mother’s eyes, but Phillip wasn’t so sure. After watching countless films and plays in O’Roarke’s company, he was without doubt the N.Y.P.D.’s foremost authority on actors and acting. While Belinda, despite a few flubbed lines here and there, seemed well cast as the demure and dutiful Perdita, for him she lacked that indefinable something Josh called “presence.” As she had once told him, “It’s that thing—and I think you have to be born with it—that draws the audience’s eye before you even open your mouth and keeps it on you. In film, a good director can create some of that focus for an actor. But onstage, it can’t be manufactured. You’ve just got to have it.”

The little spitfire Sanchez had it in spades, as did Jocelyn. But Belinda was so achingly beautiful that whatever presence she lacked was hardly missed.

“Oh, rats! I can’t see her,” Miriam hissed and leaned forward to tap Curtis on the shoulder. “Ryson, they’re blocking Bellie.”

“That’s because they’re dancing around her, Miriam,” the long-suffering director hissed back. “It’s a May dance. She is, symbolically speakin’, the maypole. Get it? Now hush up. She’ll be down front as soon as we get to Autolycus’ song.”

Only they didn’t get to the song because Autolycus strummed his lute once and broke a string. The choreographed merrymaking came to a dirgelike close.

“Props!” Ryson rose to his feet as the Prop Master came onstage, and pleaded, “Please, please, tell me we have a back-up lute.”

“Uh, yuh, yuh, we do.” The Prop Master, a black girl in horn-rimmed glasses and a T-shirt with the logo ANITA TOLD THE TRUTH, stood far right wringing her hands. “It’s in one of the trunks. I’m just not sure … which trunk.”

“Well, find it,” Curtis boomed, and the girl shot like a cannonball into the wings. “All right, people, let’s take it back to—”

“Uh, Ry, ’scuse me. But long as we’ve stopped, can I make a little adjustment?” Lyle Davie sauntered down the aisle plucking a threaded needle from a pincushion fixed on his wrist with an elastic band. He skipped up the escape steps without waiting for permission, adding, “Prince Denny’s about to lose his cloak, see.

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