five days. random thoughts

every time a random singaporean comes up to me and offers their help - JOY.

suddenly you realise that a lot more songs require dances than you actually planned for, and that people actually really do look stupid standing there and singing.

oh, wait. we only have 8 mikes, but 13 people.

the set is lying in pieces in my room right now. specifically? 10 x 10-foot lengths of 1 and 1/4 inch pvc pipe. joints. pipe cutter. pipe joiner. big orange home depot buckets. we need cloth. we need soil. go figure.

my crew are basically do-it-all experts on random projects i toss to them. before spring break it was... finding pictures of noodles. then it was... typing lyrics into powerpoint. last weekend i told them to make me a cardboard taxi. this week - find a way to suspend a projector screen from a roof thing.

fact: exhaustion leads to the downfall of my english capacities. i was writing down notes for the finale, and i realised grace needed to come out earlier from backstage before she could walk forward to say her narrator spiel. in my excel notes (which were conveniently displayed for all to see on the projector screen), i typed out "grace needs to pre-come".

act 3 was literally completed a week before the show starts. this results in.. issues with act 3 in general. yes, issues.

there is a certain scene in act 3 which is referred to as the filler scene. i literally wrote act 3 scene 5, act 3 scene 7, and realised that something needed to come in the middle. in between i left a blank page and a title that said 'filler scene' for a really long time. the title is still 'filler scene'. you'll see why. (it was meant to be a nice reprise... and now its, uhm, echoes.)

if u pick through the script with a fine-toothed comb, you can still find remnants of where planned songs used to be. there's also a certain scene in act 1 that ought to be a song... but instead has ended up as uh - spoken word crap. i was uh, trying to experiment with consonance and assonance and repetition and all that shite.

i sometimes wonder how much more awesome guorui would be than he already is if i rewrote his role entirely in chinese.

russell was born to wear an apron.

surprisingly, a lot of people in this cast do not know what (a) mamee poko (b) good morning towel is. cultural issues?

i need to make sure we do bows tomorrow.

at this point, now that the script is completed, i feel a little bit more than an engineer than an artisan - i've finally put all the moving parts together.. now i just need to add oil and hope it runs.