It's a fella's prerogative to change his mind...

....ah, rewrites. As we've been working to make this new adaptation of "The Last Unicorn" as strong as possible in the past few months, we've found that many of the choices I made in previous drafts have had to fall by the wayside. I thought I'd mention one of the biggies here so you aren't too shocked when you see it:

We've decided we want the same actress to play both Amalthea and the Unicorn.

I know, I know- I had planned on them being played by different actresses. In fact, you may recall I did an entire post explaining in detail why that was a good idea. Well, several rewrites and table reads later I've come to a different point of view. I think that it helps the audience (especially audience members who aren't as familiar with the story) to be following one actress as the protagonist across the entire performance. It gives the Unicorn a stronger emotional arc and makes the audience more invested in their journey if they don't have to overcome that mental hurdle of having a completely different body playing the role for most of Act 2. Having one actress play both has its own challenges -we now have a pretty fast quick change to pull off near the end of the show, for one- but one of the benefits is we get to further utilize the talents of ensemble member Kyla Embrey- who I already knew was going to be a fabulous Amalthea, but am now pleased to announce will be playing both roles. Yay Kyla!

Another change- we have completed casting for "Unicorn," and I'm very pleased with the team we've assembled. One post on this blog discussed mask design for Mommy Fortuna. Originally I had thought that we weren't going to find an age-appropriate actress for the role- in fact, we may have wound up with one of the talented but decidedly twentysomething ladies of our ensemble in the role- thus the mask. I was delighted to have some fantastic age-appropriate ladies audition, and now that one of them has joined the cast as Mommy Fortuna, I'm thinking the mask is less necessary. Haven't made the decision for sure, yet, but I think we'll figure it out pretty quickly in rehearsals.

What can I say? It's a fella's prerogative to change his mind. : - )