From Ellen Jacobs in New Jersey:
Hello Nan, You are now preparing to take Camille Claudel on a new leg of its journey at The National Alliance for Musical Theatre's Annual Festival of New Musicals in October. How do you go about taking a full length musical and preparing it for a 45 minute reading? Are you going to use several scenes from the musical as it was presented at Goodspeed last summer or have you made changes for this presentation? How many musical numbers will be included? Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Dear Ellen,

How are you? So sorry it's taken me this long to respond to your question. Yes, we are all very excited about taking Camille to the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. How do I go about condensing two hours into 45 minutes? With great difficulty. Actually, it hasn't been really that hard because we had already made decisions about aspects of the show which we wanted to change, and I found it kind of refreshingly challenging to cut the story down to its core. No, we are not excerpting scenes from the Goodspeed version. Instead, I have written a flow-through 30-page script which will present the whole story (again, in its most succinct light). I believe we're doing about 10 songs - I haven't really counted. We go into rehearsal soon, and I expect then my main job will be to keep it down to 45 minutes by yelling at all the actors "Faster! Faster!". Here's hoping that impetus will take us straight into many more theaters.

My best to you,
Nan