Good morning, all! I have an intense day today. Mercury landed in retrograde and completely messed up my existence yesterday! I have only myself to blame for a lot of it, but it does affect my music prep team, and that hurts me to no end. Over a month ago, before I became tied up with the Appalachian Christmas piece, I had spent a sday with my colleague Peter going through the ROBERTA full scores, attempting to assemble a reconstruction, bar count, and all things needed to assemble a budget. Act one was fine, but we were sloppy on Act Two, and going through Act Two yesterday, we added 500 bars of musicto the budget, which took the music prep work to an enormously high amount. Primarily for two reasons:
1. the music underscoring for ROBERTA is intentionally continuous, with song flowing in and out of it; this seems to be Kern's approach to MUSIC IN THE AIR and THE CAT AND THE FIDDLE - nonstop scoring
2. all the sections of underscorng with dialogue need new piano-vocal scores created with the dialogue in place; I didn't do this for EILEEN and it was hell for the singers, jumping back and forth between dialogue sheets and vocal books.
So, when the Man from Philadelphia got my email on the music prepbudget rise, he pulled the plug on all work on THE RED MILL until ROBERTA is under control and we know exactly where the budget will settle. I need to spend some time crunching numbers today to bring the budget down.
I also have a few neighborhood errands to run and an apartment to tidy. My friend Joseph Rubin is coming by at 6:45 to hear the 2nd disk of EILEEN, and this place is a mess.