#Blueprint — The World Still Need You, Boris Yeltsin!

The most exciting and horrifying experience. Sit with your work for an entire week, examine every nook and cranny, and see what works, what reads, what tracks, when it tracks, how it unfold, etc. and to do so with ZERO music. The word and plot only. Let it stand on its own, even if it means to knock down what was built FOR the music. The result is the picture above.

#Blueprint Project in Hartsville, SC is the brainchild of Dr. Christi McLain. It allowed for me, Joshua McGuire, and Christopher Mirto to have the liberty and freedom to sit with Yeltsin in Texas! for an entire week. We have plans to return in the spring to work with her students. The writing team essentially spent the entire time developing the book for the musical. Josh and I had revised our opera into a musical and filleted open the score. We then met up with Chris, a phenomenal director and dramaturg based at Oberlin. We kept coming back to the idea “Wow…isn’t it nuts that Yeltsin visited a grocery store and it changed history.”

Now the book of the musical can stand on it’s own. The music will now be reshaped, pruned, and find new ways to enhance the story and keep the energy…and hilarity going.