The joke's on... Poe?

Yesterday, Chan McQuay said all the photos in the cast album would be shots of us all laughing in rehearsals and people would say, “This is a Poe musical??” It was one of those days where everyone got their feet muddy and worked really hard, but we did have occasional outbursts of laughter from things that were just so nuts. For instance, Chan during MALESTROM III forgot she’s supposed to end up stage right, so at the last minute she made a mad dash across the stage to hit her spot and proudly turned and said, “Well, I did make it, Eric!” We did version A-R of the finale today and finally settled on it. There were many loose ends to tie up and making all the correct decisions and journeys clear was not an easy task. Once again, Matt had some of his music on the chopping block and Grace's book as well, but we’re all thrilled with the end result. It’s interesting working on a new show, as you can clearly tell when something works and when it doesn’t. I always listen to the actors when they're confused as to why they’re doing something — if they’re confused, then the audience surely will be. We went back to our motto from the first day of rehearsal, “if we can't justify it, out it goes." We finished working through the entire show and this morning at 10am we'll do a run from start to finish. All the actors went home last night to study their lines since memorizing poetry is different that memorizing a normal musical, and Nevermore surely is not a normal musical by any stretch. At the end of the day, everyone was really tired as the show is emotionally draining to rehearse. So we all shared champagne and beer and called it a day.

—ES