I rewrote the song...

It was actually very easy, once it came down to understanding what was wrong with it.

Also, I talked to Larry about whether it would be better to have the play play as written, with Melisande realizing that her mother had been lying about the whole "hair isn't important" thing, or whether I needed this extra level of the Queen having sacrificed her own hair to benefit her Theoretical Idea of What Her Future Daughter Might Want, and the Queen having resented that sacrifice her entire life, and how it probably tied in to the way she and the King raised Melisande to devalue desire, and etc. etc. etc. and Larry said "Of course you need to try to do it that way. It'll be so much better if you can pull it off, there will be so much more to communicate and so much more for an audience to learn, and if you can't pull it off you can always revert back to Nesbit's version."

There's someone who wrote something like that once, whom I can't remember, but it was the idea that the test of whether something is good is whether you'd revert back to the previous variation if you had the option.

(This is, like, 50 percent Paul Graham and 50 percent David Deutsch.)

(Also, I remembered correctly.)

And I would definitely never ever ever revert back to the previous draft of this song.

I will tell you very quickly how I solved the problem, in case you may be trying to solve a similar problem in your own work. I will also warn you that my solution may be in no way applicable to your problem, which is undoubtedly different in some fundamental sense. That said, the breakdown of how I came to my solution may be useful.