A Motive For Murder (4 page)

“That had better stop immediately,” Auntie Lil said
grimly. “Or I shall have to insist on an announcement.” She began
looking around for a microphone—Auntie Lil said very few things in
jest—but when she noticed Lane Rogers at the far right edge of the
main curtain, peering out from backstage, she sank lower in her
seat and took a great interest in the hem of one of her trouser
legs instead.

T.S. sat stunned by the difference between the world
churning outside the theater and the world percolating inside it.
The well-dressed, pampered preteen crowd seemed oblivious to issues
of race, talent, or culture. They, instead, had focused to the
point of hysteria on one single burning goal: to catch a glimpse in
the flesh of someone they recognized from the silver screen, to be
able to say that they had seen Mikey Morgan in person. T.S. wasn’t
sure what it all meant for the future of the world, but he knew
clearly what it meant to him: despite the presence of Lilah, he
really should have followed his better instincts and just stayed
home in bed.

“I wonder what Martinez has in store for us tonight?”
Lilah said to T.S., referring to the Metro’s temperamental artistic
director.

This was a very good question.
The Nutcracker
had as many interpretations as it had productions. In an effort to
attract an audience and captivate new generations, ballet companies
all over the world had put their own spin on the rather macabre
Christmas story of a young girl gifted with a wooden nutcracker and
her subsequent dreams of toy soldiers, a Mouse King and his troops,
the Sugar Plum Fairy, and other exotic creatures. Versions ranged
from the classical, featuring rich turn-of-the-century costumes, to
the romantic, with long flowing gowns and nearly lawless
improvisations. The world of modern dance had even weighed in with
one particularly memorable version by Mark Morris called
Hard
Nut,
which featured a sixties-era American setting, complete
with stoned party guests, undertones of adultery, and a stage full
of bell-bottomed dancers doing the bump. How Martinez intended to
top these versions and draw an audience in the creative and
fiercely competitive New York City area remained to be seen.

“I think his ‘vision,’ as he calls it, is going to be
along the lines of ‘more is more,’” Auntie Lil confided. “I was
able to sneak into one rehearsal and they were practicing the
toy-soldiers-versus-the-mice battle scene. There were enough
dancing rodents on stage to make me queasy. It was an infestation
more than anything else.”

Flooding the stage with dancers was not, at first
glance, a bad move on the artistic director’s part. The more
students he could use from the Metro’s ballet school, the more
tickets he could sell to proud relatives. And perhaps even score
some points for pageantry along the way.

Or perhaps not.

As the curtain rose on the main set it was obvious
that Auntie Lil had been right. Martinez was going for quantity
over quality. He chose to begin the ballet with a meaningless
preface staged on the proscenium in front of a painted backdrop
depicting the stately home where the central story would unfold.
Buckets of snow fell from the rafters above, wafting over the
orchestra and causing the French horn player to look up in alarm.
T.S. expected Nanook of the North to come pirouetting by at any
second accompanied by a team of prancing huskies. Instead, a troop
of children emerged out of this flurry of plastic flakes and headed
for center stage like well-trained lemmings. There, they executed a
dizzying array of leaps and turns before entering a front door cut
into the simulated house front. Scores of adult dancers depicting
their parents scurried across the stage and followed them inside
the door, each stopping first to exhibit their poise and control
with a determined ferociousness that quickly turned the scene into
a dance contest that would have made even Dick Clark nervous.

As the backdrop rose out of sight an ostentatiously
furnished parlor set was revealed. Perhaps Clara and her family
were bunking down at the Trump Plaza. The usual Christmas tree was
curiously missing from the stage. But the excess space was easily
filled with dancers pantomiming their roles as excited children and
parents at a Christmas party. Auntie Lil searched through the crowd
for a dark face, but she did not really expect to see Fatima Jones.
She had heard that the young girl had declined an offer to dance a
lesser role, and had rather admired her spunk.

The party scene deteriorated into a
turn-of-the-century Woodstock with waves of dancers whirling and
parting and forming again, taking turns dominating the stage. How
anyone could find their mark given the crowded conditions, Auntie
Lil could not fathom.

The young lady who had replaced Fatima Jones as
Clara—Julie Perkins, according to the program—was not bad, but she
had no sparkle. Her body was certainly a perfect example of the
long and lean frame favored in American ballet, but her dancing
lacked passion. Good ballet, Auntie Lil believed, combined skilled
movement with real emotion. Julie Perkins possessed one of these
traits quite admirably, but completely lacked the other. Her blond
hair had been carefully wound at the nape of her neck in an older
style that most Claras wore. The reason why became obvious when
Herr Drosselmeyer entered the party. Martinez was playing up a
romantic relationship between Clara and this mysterious friend of
her family.

He’d done this for a very good reason. As promised
or, more accurately, threatened, Martinez had combined the parts of
Drosselmeyer and the Prince, awarding both to Mikey Morgan. In this
manner, the young teen idol would be onstage for a maximum amount
of time, delighting the audience and, if one stretched a point,
playing two romantic roles. Not coinci-dentally, he could also
dance part of his first-act role cloaked in a black, floor-length
cape, thus disguising his ineptitude.

 But not even the cape could mask Mikey Morgan’s
melodramatic sense of emotion. Making the leap from the silver
screen back to the stage had apparently triggered a histrionic
reflex in the young film star. He interpreted the admittedly creepy
Drosselmeyer as if he were the greedy landlord in an old vaudeville
play. He stalked around the stage, leered at Clara, waved the toy
nutcracker around like it was a bomb, and frequently whipped his
cape in the face of the other dancers. All that was missing was a
twirly black mustache. None of this dampened the enthusiasm of his
audience, however, since squeals and sighs continued to rise from
the darkened rows with religious fervor.

In one particularly ill-chosen
pas de trois,
Drosselmeyer demonstrated a series of steps to Clara and her little
brother. This had the unfortunate effect of directly comparing
Mikey Morgan’s lack of technique with the talents of better
dancers. There would be no need for either Auntie Lil or T.S. to
loudly complain about his lack of finesse at intermission. It would
be obvious to anyone that the years spent in Hollywood had
eradicated any discipline or ballet aptitude that the young man
might once have possessed.

This inescapable fact was confirmed when Morgan shed
his cloak for a
pas de deux
with Clara a few moments later.
The grace of this classic ballet partnership was ruined when he
hoisted her into the air as if she weighed five times more than he
and then set her down like he was planting fence posts. Worse
still, his appearance in tights made it obvious that he was not in
top physical condition, and toward the end of the passage, Julie
Perkins began to favor her right foot as if she had been injured by
all the manhandling.

As the party scene progressed it became clear that
this particular interpretation of
The Nutcracker
would go
down in history for all the wrong reasons. At one point, the boys
separated from the girls and mounted wooden hobby horses for what
was intended as a charming showcase for the talents of the corps de
ballet. Unfortunately, so many young male dancers occupied the
stage that they stampeded across it like Custer’s charge, with
equally ill-fated results. Then, during a Punch-and-Judy segment
where puppets entertain the party guests, Martinez let so many
young dancers ad-lib unmercifully that it triggered an instant
dislike for child dancers in the many audience members who had,
until then, convinced themselves that child dancers were at least a
cut above child actors.

The one bright spot in the confusion was the debut of
Rudy Vladimir as the Nutcracker. If the young man was upset at
being bumped from the lead role, he did not show it. Instead, his
love for dance shone through. As Clara unwrapped her oversized gift
Rudy burst from the box onto center stage with the assurance and
mastery of dancers twice his age. As if out of respect, the
cluttered corps stepped back to give him more room. He used every
inch of available space as he whirled, leaped, and bounced his way
through a two-minute solo that came close to bringing the curtain
down. Every movement was breathtaking yet reined in just enough to
convey the feeling that he was, indeed, a wooden creature. Even the
starstruck girls in the audience burst into wild applause when he
was done.

“Fancy bit of footwork, there,” T.S. whispered
hopefully to Auntie Lil, painfully aware that his vocabulary as a
critic lacked finesse.

“It only makes the rest of them look worse,” she
whispered back. “This is a catastrophe.”

But the real catastrophe still waited in the wings.
As the act drew to a close it became obvious why the Christmas tree
had been missing from the set. There was no room at the inn.
Martinez had chosen to make the tree so huge and the corps de
ballet so large that physics forbade their occupying the stage at
the same time. Instead, he had reserved the appearance of the tree
as a kind of climax for the Act I curtain. Members of the corps
began to melt off to the side, leaving Clara and her family alone
on the stage, where they clustered, bidding Drosselmeyer good
night. Suddenly lights appeared behind a transparent scrim that
masked a rear series of simulated windows. The window frames
appeared in stark relief and the shadows of departing guests could
be seen crossing in front of the windows. A gasp rose from the
audience as a twenty-foot, brightly lit Christmas tree began to
descend from above the stage, framed by the backlit windows. The
base of the tree inched downward majestically in time to the music,
but when it reached halfway, true disaster struck.

The supporting weight controlling its descent
apparently snapped, sending the tree crashing to the stage floor in
a frightening explosion of breaking lights and crashing limbs. The
dancers jumped back, startled, and the well-lit windows were left
barren at center stage. Out of nowhere, the shadow of a man hanging
from the neck by a rope swung in silhouette behind the windows. It
was grotesquely realistic, sweeping in from stage right in a full
arc before swinging back again. Worse, it grew and shrank in size
as it swung, thanks to a spotlight set front right.

This is really going too far,
T.S. thought.
This is supposed to be a children’s show.

The audience murmured uneasily when the dancers
onstage continued to stare at the swinging shadow. Suddenly the
young dancer playing Clara’s little brother screamed and pointed up
toward stage right. As if he had summoned its presence, the body of
a man hanging from a thick brown rope swung into view, this time in
front of the windows, hurtling across the stage until its feet
touched the fallen Christmas tree and the body swung back.

The audience held its breath and the dancers stepped
back in unison, crowding together like frightened sheep. When Mikey
Morgan broke free of the group and dashed off stage left, a buzz
ran through the audience. What was this? The body was swinging
slowly to a stop, barely visible at the edge of the stage-right
curtain. The dancer playing Clara’s father approached the body
slowly and laid a fingertip of his right hand on the cheek of the
hanging man. The dancer paused then began to shout, waving his
hands frantically to someone backstage. Chaos broke out onstage.
Julie Perkins abandoned her Clara facade and began to scream. Two
older dancers dragged her offstage. A stagehand streaked across the
set to the hanging figure, followed by a group of younger dancers
still dressed as party guests. They crept toward the body and
several began to cry, causing a group of older dancers to scurry
out from backstage to collect them. The stagehand gesticulated
wildly to an unseen cohort until the curtain began to descend. A
young girl in the audience screamed, and like a town full of dogs
picking up the cry at twilight, young girls all over the vast
auditorium echoed her sound. “Lights!” someone shouted, and the
adults took up the cry, adding to the pandemonium. “Lights! Lights!
Lights!”

Abruptly, the houselights blazed. T.S. blinked in the
glare, confused by what he had seen. “What is this?” he asked
Herbert.

Herbert turned to him, eyes wide. “Lillian is gone,”
he said.

Auntie Lil had insisted she sit on the aisle and now
the aisle seat was most assuredly empty.

“Something’s wrong,” Lilah whispered. “This doesn’t
seem right.”

“I’ll say,” T.S. agreed.

 Auntie Lil found the side steps easily in the
darkness; she had marked them as her escape route earlier, just in
the obnoxious gum cracking from all the squealing young girls had
continued. Scurrying up, she slipped behind the heavy velvet side
curtains and followed the sound of anxious voices.

“Cut him down!” someone was insisting. “He may still
be alive.” Others argued to leave him as he was until the police
arrived.

Auntie Lil brushed past another curtain and came
abruptly on a macabre tableau. Costumed dancers crowded in a circle
around the crumbled figure of a man slumped on the floor, his head
bent back grotesquely. A thick rope encircled his neck, and coiled
on the floor beside him lay the ragged end where the rope had been
hastily sawed in two seconds before.