The Forbidden Phoenix
Today was a day off from rehearsal, but the creative team was still at work. After a tech dress rehearsal of the first act last night, we found a whole bunch of elements that needed to be worked. Right now, we're 15 minutes long. We have to be 85 minutes to be accommodate all the school matinees. The director and fight choreographer have to go through all the fights and simplify them so that they aren't so long. I just got off the phone with the director to chop about 5 minutes worth of text from the script. None of it will hurt the story. And on the chopping block is one of the numbers from the show. We don't want to lose the song, but if we have to, we will cut it away. The number is one of my favourites... Daddy's Coming Home. Normally, time isn't a factor on a show, but because the majority of the performances are school matinees, we have abide by school bussing schedules. The realities of producing theatre come down to time and money.
If you can react to these changes with a level head, you can find ways to streamline the script without hurting the story. I think the cuts we made actually help the story rather than hurt them, and I'm thinking of making those cuts permanent. The key in all this is to not be precious about anything except perserving the story. Lines can be cut, but key story elements can not.
Thankfully, my five years working as a story editor in television have trained me to look for big cuts without hurting story elements. I'm trying to cut too much though, because it will totally mess with the actors' minds if we have wholesale changes with two days to go.
What's that line from Shakespeare in Love about how a show comes together... it's a mystery?