project update for any who will

Well, that's one dress rehearsal survived. Invited audience members stayed through the whole thing, yay. More to the point, nobody got fidgety during Act II: Attack of the Suffrage Referenda! And it held together pretty well despite a missing cast member and blocking in its infancy. So...win.

What's interesting, though, is how much the spoken parts fade against the songs. Or maybe that's just  a corollary of that old college lit-class law that says you hand the damn paper in already when you can't remember a shred of what you wrote.

Or maybe it's just the strength of the songs, which is, of course, how it should be. Anyway, several people said the narrative worked, so we run with that.

Additions and subtractions:

One inquiry from the Labor History quarter about working Elizabeth Gurley Flynn into the narrative for the Lawrence Strike / Bread & Roses segment.
(Yes we absolutely should but can we?)

The Lawrence into Titanic bit remains problematic post-editing -- we are now backing into Titanic through a very narrow crawlspace of anti-suffrage reference, which used to be a broad boulevard of High Edwardian anti-suffrage bloviation. (C'mon! Cantankerous viragos! Fun!) But there has been some give on the idea of rewriting that part completely, so at least that's on the table for down the line.

The other side of the writing table also suggested that the Ida B Wells segment has taken too much of a hit in the editing process, and we should reinstate a key line from the July draft. Huzzah!

It strikes me also how visual this show ought to be (but won't be for the foreseeable future), because of how visual the movement gets after 1900. Advertising conquers all.