Opera, Schmopera...now becoming a musical!!

Writer and filmmaker, Don Roff said “I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living s*** out of it.”

For the last 11 months, Joshua McGuire and I have been revising Yeltsin in Texas! We are converting the 60-minute one-act opera into a 90-minute musical comedy. While the DNA of musical theatre was always in the piece, it has been quite a journey creating a brand-new work off of our original opera.

Songs have been added. Chorus numbers and dancing have been injected. Characters and relationships given more time to breath and develop. The ink is still very wet, the clay certainly malleable. The show may change 100 more times, grow, evolve, take on new perspectives, but one thing these revisions have shown is that Yeltsin in Texas! is going to be a kick-ass musical!

The premiere happens early February 2020. Late February, revisions began with an intense, one-week writing session in Florida, adding 25 minutes of new material! Then the world shuts down. Musical Theatre workshop plans for the summer get cancelled, and all of this brand new stuff is stuck on the page.

One of the most fascinating things was that during the pandemic, the world got to experience wonder of the grocery store. It was THE life line to everyday Americans. It was deemed essential. We got to feel the long lines, the “limit one per person,” the missing items—things here today, gone the next. This was something so foreign to Americans. We can now feel the way Boris Yeltsin did and the new show explores that space.

I reached out to many amazing friends to do virtual demos of the new material, even meeting some great new singers along the way! These demos allowed for more and more revisions.

I hope to give you all updates as this process unfolds and any time there is new news about the show.

—Evan