Forbidden Phoenix - Day 4
Everyone is fried today. We worked scene five, which is a huge set piece number in which the three leads sing and fight at the same time. The chorus was flipping around to beat the band. By the end of the day, everyone was pretty worn out, but the results were amazing. We still have another sequence in the scene to work tomorrow, but after that we'll just have one more scene to go and the second act will be put together in a rough form.
My job now is to sit in rehearsal and see where the little bits of the character and story need to be fleshed out. I'm under no illusions that a rewrite I did in a day and a half is word perfect. My brain is still not quite ready to pull apart the script, but I'm hoping when I see everything together, I can start putting a more critical eye to the story.
As for my composer, Bob Walsh, he has one new song left to write, but we've been sitting on it because there's an existing song that the director likes and wants to use. If that's the case, we'll have to adjust lyrics to fit the music. I'm leaning more to doing a new song entirely that takes inspiration from the music of Chinese lion and dragon dances. If that can give us some raw energy, then we have something that is cultural authentic and dramatically powerful.
Anyway, this was a great day to watch towards the end. I feel like we've captured lightning in a bottle and I can't wait for Edmonton audiences to see the sneak preview of this second act.
Tonight will be the first night that I'll have a chance to relax a little and maybe even try to do work not related to the play. I have to pitch another Journal article and write it before I head off to Mexico, and I want to work on True Story. But if I have melon head after dinner, I'm just going for a run and doing some reading.