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When I come on to any project, my primary criteria is I have to be able to hear it
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There was music everywhere. There's all the ghosts of all this music that float through
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Savannah and float through the characters, and it's so many different eras and so many
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different styles that it's kind of coming at you all the time
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It was quite wonderful that that's what happened, and we're telling the story of a lot of different
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people in one city, so they should have their own sound. They're all individuals
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When I read the book, my experience of it was that the Lady Shibley stole the book
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And so I said, that's the story I'm kind of interested in telling
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is that the Lady Shibley finds her way to steal our musical
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That tension in what the characters themselves were asking of us turned out to be kind of the fun of the show, is they're all fighting for real estate
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They're all just fighting to get a chance to tell their story. Literally fighting for real estate in the nonfiction book
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and fighting for the real estate of the musical as well. Watching exceptional actors inhabit these characters just allows them to come to life
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You only get that as part of this collaboration, this exciting moment where Jay Harrison or Tom
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or Sierra just sort of own something, and they own it so completely that it becomes something that
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we've created together. It isn't just something that Taylor or I put on a piece of paper
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The goal is that you're making something that's larger than yourself. So when the actors take the material and put their bodies and their voices and their
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own kind of spirits into it, that's when it becomes something larger than
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your little idea that you had. I mean, I don't know, I feel like I get a front row seat
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watching a musical every day, so it's just fun for me