O Brother, Oliver

On a sad note of change, we had to change the play. Didn't have to, but suddenly a bunch of students and parents were objecting to the use of the musical O Brother Where Art Thou. And I didn't want to deal with so many objections, or go forward with students not really on board. I take comfort in the idea that Jesus, too, was lead at times where he did not want to go- as indeed O Brother shows. O Brother could have been a great production. So now it's Oliver, which I do also like, but I'm sad for the loss of opportunity. And it will be a lot more work for the students in only 5 months rather than the 8 months we would have had from the beginning of the year working on the other production. It took me 13 hours straight of watching the musical to piece together the different parts of Oliver- and this was after 4 hours of watching O Brother to begin to do the same treatment to that script! (We can buy the music in America, but the script we get online, and then don't charge admission. But often the script doesn't include something like stage directions or characters, who's saying what, so that has to be added. And I'm working with 8 females and 3 males, so we are producing Oliva (silent r), with a female Fagin, Miss Bumble, etc., and only males who have to be male due to strength, cultural mores, or romantic interest, like Bill and Mr. Brownlow. So that's a lot of rewriting.)