Nate Expectations - Hardcover

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Tim Federle is the showrunner and executive producer of High School Musical: the Musical: the Series, which he created for Disney+. His novels include the New York Times Notable Book Better Nate Than Ever and its Lambda Literature Award–winning sequel—which Lin-Manuel Miranda called “a wonderful evocation of what it’s like to be a theater kid” (New York Times). A film adaptation of Nate, written and directed by Federle, will premiere on Disney+ in spring 2022. The film stars Aria Brooks, Joshua Bassett, Lisa Kudrow, and Rueby Wood as Nate. Tim’s hit series of cocktail recipe books, including Tequila Mockingbird, have sold over half a million copies worldwide. He cowrote the Broadway musical adaptation of Tuck Everlastingand won the Humanitas Prize for cowriting the Golden Globe and Academy Award–nominated Best Animated Feature Ferdinand, starring John Cena and Kate McKinnon. A former Broadway dancer, Tim was born in San Francisco, grew up in Pittsburgh, and now divides his time between Los Angeles and the internet.

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Nate Expectations

Not Bitter!!

So . . . some breaking news.

The show didn’t get a single Tony Award nomination.

I suppose I should get that out now, in case you think the rest of this is gonna be the enlightened thoughts of a famous person. Just don’t want to disappoint you.

E.T.: The Musical did get an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination. For costumes. (Yay.) But, look, if you saw the way the rubber E.T. suit glistens in the spotlight, and how the audience oohs and aahs over the whole cast in alien garb for the curtain call (we tap dance!), you’d nominate us for costumes, too.

Correction. Unless you’re a Tony Awards nominator. In which case, you’d think we’d opened several seasons ago. Or never opened at all!

Not bitter.

“Well, this is awkward,” one of my dressing roommates says. We’re five floors up, backstage at the Shubert Theater, and nobody’s making eye contact. The nominations came out this morning. (Well, other shows’ nominations did. Not us!)

“Agreed,” I manage to kind of say. I’m actually surprised how emotionally it comes out—I thought I’d gotten all my tears out back at Aunt Heidi’s place, in Queens. She handed me a square of toilet paper (she says Kleenex is a waste) and murmured something about how “crying in Queens is redundant.” Adults like to talk in poetry, did you know that?

Knock-knock. The “nice” stage manager (Lori, not Ashlee, who hates kids) is at our dressing-room door. Stage managers are like teachers who wear all black, as if they’re at a funeral where you’re expected to carry a clipboard and hound people about not eating chocolate while in costume. “Hey guys,” Lori says, “just . . . checkin’ in.”

Hoo, boy. This particular stage manager never “just checks in,” unless something bad is in the air. (Sometimes literally—recently one of my dressing roommates heated up broccoli in the company microwave and didn’t put a lid on the Tupperware.)

“Are we in trouble?” I ask, and Lori makes one of those faces you make when you’re watching a YouTube of a very old dog trying to hop up on a sofa.

“Of course not,” she says.

Oh, boy. It really is bad. Any time an adult is checking in but doesn’t have punishment up their sleeve, you know something big is going down.

“I just figured you guys might be a little bummed out,” Lori says. “You know, because of the news.”

“We know,” we all say at once.

Really, though, it’s a lack of news. Is it news if you aren’t even noticed? I mean, I’m not trying to be self-pitying here—I’m still just a kid from the Midwest who managed to break his way into a Broadway show—but, c’mon. Did we really deserve this? The New York Times called us “surprising!” and the New York Post said: “See this show, if you dare, while it’s still running.”

In some circles, those are raves!

We dressing-room boys have been on a group-text chain all day. It started with us sending a bunch of GIFs of former Tony Award–winning actresses tripping while they were walking up to the podium. Classic, harmless boy stuff.

By the third nomination category, though—which we were all live-streaming from the comfort of our own studio apartments—when Elliott’s Mom didn’t get a Supporting Actress nomination (she literally sings better than anyone on the internet), our group text went quiet. And then it started filling up with all kinds of all-cap SWEAR WORDS that I will leave out here. But you can imagine.

“Okay, well,” Lori the stage manager says, trailing off before taking off. “Just doin’ my rounds . . .” There are just certain things you can’t wrap up with a cheery fortune-cookie response. Not that she doesn’t try: “Go out there and tell the story tonight,” she says, a moment after leaving us, popping back in and looking unconvinced by her own advice. “Oh, and by the way—this is your half-hour call.”

The room is quiet. We’ll have an audience in those seats in a half hour. No matter how we feel—and we all have a lot of feelings—we’ll have to plaster on some smiles and go put on a show.

I don’t think people realize how weird and hard it is to perform on Broadway. It’s eight shows a week, two of them matinees, and no matter what’s going on in your personal life—like, if you happen to regularly kiss the boy who’s playing the lead, and thus all you want to do is stare at him when you’re onstage together in the Act One classroom scene—you have to just “tell the story.”

That was our assistant director’s signature phrase, when he’d come back to check in on the show in the weeks leading up to the Tony nominations.

Correction: to our lack of Tony nominations.

“Just go out there,” the assistant director said to us guys, “and get in the mindset of your character. What does your character want? That’s your only responsibility. To show the audience what your characters want, and to bring your full, professional conviction to it.”

“My character wants to be a vital part of a Tony-nominated hit,” I wanted to say. But I’ve been trained to just nod and write down what adults say. This is a good overall life technique, I’ve come to learn: Just nod at adults, whether you agree or not. Apparently—this is a shock, but my Aunt Heidi told me—adults “just want to be heard.”

Try being fourteen!

Oh, the Tonys! The Tonys, for those who don’t know—and if you don’t, buckle up, because it’s gonna be a lot of this—are like the Oscars of theater. Or as I like to say: The Oscars are the Tonys of film.

“At this evening’s performance”—the stage manager announcements are now droning on from our overhead speakers, and they’re typically pretty epic—“the role of Elliott’s Mom will be played by Marci Carroll.”

All us boys sit up straight, shook by this news. Marci has only been on once, and only for half an act. It was a few months ago, when our regular Elliott’s Mom came down with something mysterious after eating a street hot dog on a “disastrous” (her word) first Tinder date with a handsome banker type who, in her retelling, kept calling E.T. a “play” instead of a musical. Which made me feel like I’d eaten a bad hot dog. Who are these people? Plays instead of musicals? What’s next: calling cast albums “soundtracks”?

I shudder at the memory and put gel in my hair.

Anyway, Marci’s on for Elliott’s Mom tonight.

“And now people start dropping like flies,” says Roberto, my dressing roommate who applies too much eyeliner to be playing a seventh-grade boy in mid-eighties California. “Down, down, down we go.”

This kid’s been in three other Broadway shows. Three! I heard a rumor his real name is Robert and his agent made him add the o to “stand out.” Who knows.

“Wait, why?” I see my lips saying in the dressing-room mirror. “Why are people gonna start...