Last Starfighter Musical Will Land at Village Theatre in WA; Iron Curtain, Too
By Kenneth Jones
21 Apr 2008
Village Theatre's spring Village Originals Workshop in Washington state will be dedicated to the sci-fi musical, The Last Starfighter, and the showbiz musical spoof Iron Curtain.
Fred Landau and Walter Edgar Kennon's screenplay-inspired The Last Starfighter, gaining a cult following, has been seen in an Off-Broadway run, in a developmental reading at New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) and in a full production at NYMF. There's also a cast recording in stores.
The latest revised version will be seen at Village Theatre's First Stage in Issaquah, WA, May 23-25.
Iron Curtain, the musical comedy about American musical writers penning a show for mother Russia, will be seen there June 13-15. The show is written by Susan DiLallo, Peter Mills and Stephen Weiner. It was seen in a well-reviewed Off-Off-Broadway production.
Starfighter composer-lyricist Skip Kennon told Playbill.com, "We're very encouraged by the reviews we've gotten so far for the show and the Kritzerland cast album. Still, seeing it in performance at NYMF, we saw ways of making it stronger so that the piece can potentially have a long life. NYMF gave us seven performances from which to learn in front of an audience, but Equity rules for NYMF shows gave us no possibility during that run of testing and implementing what we learned after the first NYMF performance. So we were grateful when the Village Theatre, which along with NYMF had co-presented a New York reading in 2006, offered us a chance to really work on the show in a basically risk-free environment."
What's new to the piece? Kennon (Herringbone, Time and Again) explained, "For example, we're going to experiment with cutting a ballad early in the show, because we got the sense at NYMF that the musical theatre lovers were anxious to get to the appearance of Centauri, the Robert Preston character. Also, we're going to test out flipping the numbers at the end of the first act, to end the act on an inspirational number and spirit, rather than a predominantly comic number. And, we're still playing around with the musical material for the battle sequence in Act Two; we think we got the structure of the sequence right at NYMF, but we want to try something a little more in tune with the period when the show takes place."
Most of the Issaquah workshop cast will have done their roles in a previous incarnation, "so we may even get to switch material among the three public presentations to test which tells the story best," Kennon said.
For more information about Village Theatre, which is devoted to revivals and new works, visit www.villagetheatre.org.
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