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FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Cutting Down Your Show
We kick off this year’s Festival season with our first Festival Countdown Blog! In this entry, Duane Poole, bookwriter of Beautiful Poison, gives us insight on how to prepare the 45-minute cut of the show for the Festival.
So we get the news that we made the cut. (By “we” I mean composer Brendan Milburn, lyricist Valerie Vigoda, and bookwriter me.) Our “Beautiful Poison” is in this year’s NAMT Festival! The thrill of the announcement is still fresh when we realize we have yet another cut to make — bringing our two-hour musical down to a strict forty-five minutes for the presentation.
Okay, this shouldn’t be a problem. As both a writer and producer, I’ve done this sort of thing countless times over the years. But there seems to be extra pressure on this particular cut. Perhaps it’s knowing who might be in our audiences this October. What can we show these theatre insiders in that abbreviated time that will truly represent the variety of music, the twists of plot, and the richness of character we three have worked so hard to create?