"Freezing" the Show.

We've just finished our first week of previews, and as usual for this sort of thing, we’ve put the show through several big changes. The show the first review audiences saw last Friday was 21 minutes longer than the version we are performing now. After seeing the first two previews Janet and Steve and I agreed that we needed to find even more economy in telling the story, so we spent last weekend looking at what cuts we would make at the beginning of this week. When the actors came back in to rehearsal Tuesday we announced significant line and scene cuts -- just about every scene (and every page!) was affected in some way. We rehearsed the Act One changes that afternoon, and did the Act Two changes Wednesday. Remarkably, the company absorbed all the changes very quickly, and by the Wednesday evening preview, we all felt the show was considerably improved by the changes. The last few nights have gone well, with almost sold out houses for the last two previews. I'm "freezing" the show now (at least for the rest of this weekend), and won't make any final changes to the show until the rehearsal next Tuesday. That will really be our final opportunity to make changes in time before press start to come in.

- Rick