Back from another head-banger rehearsal - I knew today would be the worst in terms of revising and making the impossible work - three huge scenes totaling almost twenty-three pages - the page count was not the hard part, the content was. Nothing made sense, not one thing. So we began with the first of those scenes - I had everyone read it, we discussed the problems and then I began to chisel away and get to what the scene was actually trying to say - I thought it was taking forever, but the fact is that forty minutes later we'd not only smoothed out the problems and at least made them make sense (mostly me cutting and throwing out reworded replacement lines) but I got it blocked. The scene that followed that was so wrong at the top none of us could even make sense of it - but I finally figured out the way to begin (just a readjusted line and response) and then the rest of the scene played as it should, save for a cut or two and adding a funny bit of business and a line. Then we got to the ten page kiler scene with three numbers, not a one of which worked in any way, because the focus of the whole sequence is just so weird. Again we read through it first, and then Kay and I began to whittle away at it - we have one member of the creative team who talks to loud and vociferously for my taste - very talented but when I'm trying to sit there and fix things it's so not helpful to be talking in my ear constantly - and Kay's too - so we both, by mid-day, were pretty much shutting that down. I divided the scene into its three parts then began to cut, focus, begin the first scene correctly, remove people from the song if they were not germane and to set up an antagonism between two characters, which really helped. In the second sequence it was another everyone singing thing that made no sense to me and was actually verging on being bullyish so I took everyone out of the song except the two people who the song was germane to. Boy did that help. And in part three I did the same thing - I removed every single person from the song save for the one guy whose song it really is and boy did THAT help. It took about an hour but by the end the cast was kind of marveling that we'd actually come that far that fast. I'm not saying it's all of a sudden brilliant but I am saying no one will have trouble following the story and the characters now - and that's something big.
