Forbidden Phoenix - Day 5
Ron continued rehearsing from where we left off, just so we could get to the end of the play. We'll have to cycle back and figure out how to work in a new person for our injured chorus member. Sigh. That a big blow to us, but the cast has been great about picking up the pieces.
And boy, have there been a lot of pieces. I knew when I revised the second act, there would be some gaping holes, and one of them is right at the end of the play. Thankfully, my director and I were on the same page about what wasn't working. We weren't quite on the same page about what we thought was going to work. He wanted Laosan, the son, to still have hope when Monkey King came home. I wanted Laosan to be brainwashed by the Empress Dowager.
Ron suggested working on the current scene and building it from the pieces that existed so I had something I could write, but I put the kibosh on the improv exercise and chose instead to take an hour and a half to do up a dirty version of what I thought the ending should be. Thankfully, I won the argument and was able to give the cast something ugly, but had the right intention. With careful work and a lot of changing lines and rejigging of text, we found a good shape to the ending. Now I just have to remember all the changes, plug them in and polish the scene. If I deliver something tomorrow, then we'll have the whole second act rehearsed by the end of week one.
There's still some work to be done on songs. I think we have to look at the lyrics for act one, but that's a lower priority right now. I just want to see this new version of act two put together and see how it all hangs together. The trick in workshops is to work on the minute details and then be prepared to jettison the little moments if they don't fit in the big picture. In a lot of respects, workshopping a play is like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. It's a tough exercise, but if you're open to the collaborative medium, you can find some brilliant things.
The wonderful thing about having this staged reading is that all the major questions will be answered and all we have to do is polish the script, music and lyrics for when the show goes up for real... which I hope will be very soon.