JohnG - it's an interesting conundrum, certainly. If you saw what the original script was like you'd know how far we came in terms of making it even producible. If you think the first act is episodic now, it was much worse, as was the second act. I got rid of as much as I could, wrote new stuff, cleaned up the songs and arranging them, and was just determined to keep it all moving along. The show originally began with the Greenhorns section of Opportunity, with the two bad guys there. Then it went somewhere else, then finally to the ship. That was the biggest thing to get right and fix - I told them the first person I wanted to see in the show was Levi Strauss and everything had to go from there. I completely revised that entire section from start to finish. In the original script, Levi was never off the stage save for the Levi song. I added So Many Empty Rooms, which I wrote they lyric for and Richard wrote the music, because I needed to get him offstage for two-and-a-half minutes in act two. Glad you enjoyed and appreciated the comments.
Anyone with any questions, ask away - I love to talk about this stuff.