“Star Wars: A Musical Journey” a reality. I have a bad feeling about this.
It’s actually not as bad as it might sound.
In Star Wars: A Musical Journey, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will play a live score as excerpts from the six films are shown on a cinema screen.
The show has been put together by director George Lucas’ company Lucasfilm and composer John Williams.
It will premiere at the O2 arena in London in April before a European tour.
It will not be a traditional musical with actors playing characters from the films, but will feature live narrators.(BBC)
So at least we’re not going to to see a “Sound of Music”-like rendition, or have Boba Fett fall into the Sarlaac pit behind a silhouette sheet a-la “Wicked”. Instead, what you will experience is a rare opportunity to hear the music of John Williams performed live by one of the greatest orchestras on the planet. If you can get past the fact that Lucas is obviously trying to cash in as much as is humanly possible on the franchise, you might even enjoy yourself.
Although the two are unrelated, this event is very similar to a 2005 concert at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto titled, simply, “The Star Wars Concert“, in which the various canons from all 6 movies were played by the ~70 piece Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The hilight of that concert, however, was the fact that it was narrated live by Anthony “C-3PO” Daniels.
Much like the scene in ROTJ in which 3PO brings the Ewoks up to speed on what’s happened to our small band of rebels, Daniels would tell some of the Star Wars story, the orchestra would play the appropriate music, and so it went. I was actually there for that concert, and it was actually pretty great (even if Daniels punked off his fans, DVD sets and Sharpie markers in hand, by escaping out the side door of the building with an entourage of security guards escorting him to his awaiting Airport Limo mini-van.)
None of this makes up for the fact that Lucas has stopped treating his creation as art and is now leaning on it as nothing more than a cash cow. The gestalt of Star Wars is long forgotten in favour of merchandise, spin-offs, reinventions, and myriad other money-makers (although, to be fair, 3 of the video games were actually good to great.) Perhaps it’s time Lucas started putting pen to paper again and gave us something new and interesting, rather than relying on the greatness of his past.
Otherwise, I look forward to the inevitable Indiana Jones and the Remains of Alderaan.
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You’re right, it’s not as bad as it at first sounds…
It’s much worse! 😯
You’d have better luck getting me to attend a concert where they show excerpts of Plan 9 From Outer Space!!
Actually, that would be kinda cool…
I’d pay to see that actually 🙂
As far as the Star Wars show is concerned…I agree,why the hell keep reminding us of the unmitigated failures that were episodes 1, 2 & 3? Someone needs to load every copy of those movies and send them into space, never to be seen or spoken of again.
You REALLY want Lucas to start putting pen to paper again? Go look at his credits on IMDb and tell me you still stand by that statement. 😀
well the man hasn’t done anything new or creative since 1988 with “Willow”. I’d just like to see him at least TRY something rather than just coming up with new and ppintless star wars adventures.
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