The Cut Scene

Exactly a year ago today, Window Full of Moths, the musical I wrote for my senior project, opened in the Crescent Underground Theatre. [For those who only began following me recently: I wrote a musical! It's got lady scientists, same-sex love songs, and many other delightful things besides! And impartial reviewers found it deeply moving! You can watch the whole thing on my YouTube channel! The full show is about 80 minutes long, but if you don't have time for that, the title song and the voicemail apology number are both highlights that will give you a taste of it. Everyone who worked on it poured their hearts into it, and it would mean a lot if you checked it out.] I chronicled some of the key stages of the writing and production process on this very blog, and today I'm going to mark the anniversary by going behind the scenes once again and showing you the only scene that wound up being cut entirely in the revision process.

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Weak and Idle Themes

Some pieces of music are really good. They reach down inside you and touch you on a fundamental level, they fill your heart with joy or cleanse your mind with cathartic sorrow. Some works, on the other hand, are just bad. They're melodically dull, or harmonically uninspiring, or any of the other myriad things that can go wrong when putting notes on the page. (And I've suffered all these faults and more in my own writing. Music is hard.) But then there are the works that are almost really good. They have a lot going for them, they almost hit it out of the park, but there's just . . . something where they fundamentally miss the mark. 

And works in that last category are often the most excruciating of all.

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