Time off? What’s that?

Well, as I indicated yesterday, it’s been a busy number of days in the rehearsal room. The Friday before Christmas we did our first run through of the show, which went well. We’re still making more changes on the book and some music adjustments. We got all the music completed and recorded for Jonathan Tunick whose busy working on the orchestrations. We took the weekend off and we were back at it on Monday. We worked thru the entire show standing around the piano, clearing up questions in the music as well as scenes and made some minor adjustments. Yesterday, we started at the top of the show and blew it all apart, as I like to say. We redid the opening and got it more focused. We started adding lots of layers to the scenes and songs. It's really my favorite part of the process. It's also about the show now evolving. The more we work on the piece, the more we discover how hard it is for the actors to go against their natural instincts. Nevermore has so many emotions working on different levels and we’ve been trying to find ways to present the material that aren’t the most obvious, which has been both challenging and exciting. At the end of the day yesterday, I gave Lauren a big hug as she had done some really great work. I could feel how tense her shoulders were, so I asked "Are you stressed?" She said yeah. I replied, “Welcome to show business and the world of creating a new musical!”

The set and light crew have been working so hard over the past few days and their efforts are showing. Each day, we see more of Poe’s world coming to life and Derek McLane's set is simply stunning — smart and original. We're supposed to move into the theater on Friday, but I may delay it a day so that we have more time in the rehearsal room. Everyone is working really hard, but we all know this is a very special project that can’t be rushed and we're all lucky to be working on it.

—ES