Stratford, Prince Edward Island
The rehearsals go on, with much adventure. It's become necessary to do a much more scaled down version of the show for the workshop. Plus, it's all confirmed that the show is still way too long. Not that I didn't realize that even after the last rewrite. It's just that getting the show to a length that's acceptable for everybody is now going to require structural changes. Up until now Leo and I have retained the structure, completely cutting out only a few scenes and just making lots of edits to the dialogue. I guess that was a good start. One thing I've realized in the past couple of days is that I do have a tendency to write a lot of exposition and state the obvious - God knows I did that in Undo the Deed. So, now armed with this knowledge, certain dialogue cuts are now presenting themselves quite easily, which of course is a good thing. How I'm going to ultimately fix some of the other problems, I don't know yet, and it's been a bit of a stressful time. I was always warned that the day would come where I'd have to "kill" my "baby", and that it would be painful. I'm going to look at it as growing pains!

Anyway, the workshop is next Friday and it's all been 24-7 for me this week. When we haven't been at the theatre, I've been here creating visuals for the rear projection screen we're going to have - captions, stills, video. It took a while to edit the footage Christopher got from the train in Saskatchewan last month into a useable 3-minute piece. Christopher documented his progress and I'm proud to feature him in this latest installment, which is a bit of a departure from our usual fare but no less interesting and important!

Leo had to go back to L.A. for a few days so I'm flying solo over here. I ran up to Cavendish again to film the sunset, and tomorrow I have to go back and get the sand dunes and other locales. The next video will have to do with...well...getting video! For now you'll just have to get on the train where Maud herself travelled in 1890 - it might even be the same track! Hey, we go for authenticity here!