Recording of Last Starfighter Musical Will Blast Into Stores This Fall | Playbill

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News Recording of Last Starfighter Musical Will Blast Into Stores This Fall The score to the musical The Last Starfighter, by composer-lyricist Skip Kennon, will be released on a world premiere recording on Bruce Kimmel's new Kritzerland label, according to an announcement on Kimmel's Haineshisway.com.

Songwriter Walter Edgar "Skip" Kennon confirmed to Playbill.com that a release is in the works.

The CD is set to come out late October or early November. Website pre-orders at www.kritzerland.com will be shipped earlier than the street date.

The Last Starfighter is a science fiction musical inspired by the 1984 screenplay of the motion picture of the same name. It opened the 2004-05 season of New York's Storm Theatre, breaking the theatre's weekly attendance and weekly box office records. According to the collaborators, it lured not only the regular theatre audiences, but also sci-fi fans from as far as Seattle, L.A., Santa Fe and Colorado, many of whom professed to have come to New York especially to see the musical.

(Science fiction musicals are rare, to be sure: Little Shop of Horrors and Weird Romance come to mind.)

This was lyricist-composer Skip Kennon's first score heard in New York since Manhattan Theatre's Club's presentation of Time and Again. Kennon is also known for the solo-actor musical, Herringbone. The Last Starfighter draws on the Jonathan Betuel screenplay, about a teen video-game player enlisted to save a universe. Fred Landau wrote the libretto. The movie marked the last motion picture appearance of Robert Preston.

The performers on the CD include members of the 2004 New York production, including Charlie Pollock (Bobby Strong of Urinetown on Broadway), in the dual lead role of Alex Rogan and the Beta unit "double" put on Earth to take Alex's place; DeeGee Brandemour, Brad Coolidge, Bernardo De Paula (Jesus on TV's "Rescue Me"), Jan Leigh Herndon (Broadway's original La Cage aux Folles), Paul Jackel (Broadway's The Secret Garden), Hugh Brandon Kelly, Joseph Kolinski (Broadway's Titanic, Les Miserables and The Human Comedy), Julia Motyka, Georga Osborne (Broadway's Meet Me in St. Louis, two-time MAC Award winner), William Parry (Broadway's Sunday in the Park With George, Gypsy and Passion), Catherine Remmert, Jonathan Richard Sandler, Heather Spore (who will play the "Catherine Deneuve" role in Two River Theater's upcoming Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and Travis Walters (Broadway's Our Town).

"In a small town nestled in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1983, Alex Rogan is about to discover the adventure of a lifetime," according to production notes. "An 18-year-old with an uncertain future, Alex becomes the master of a video game only to discover that Centauri, a huckster trying to save his vulnerable galaxy and make a little money in the process, put it on Earth as a testing ground. Centauri offers Alex membership in an elite cadre of space pilots charged with protecting the universe. Alex must find a way to reach his potential, while a great danger looms out in space, waiting for him."

The Storm Theatre production of The Last Starfighter had direction by Storm artistic director Peter Dobbins, with choreography and musical staging by Jennifer Paulson Lee. Designers were Todd Ivins (set), E. Shura Pollatsek (costume), Michael Abrams (lighting) and Matthew Given (sound). Chance Michaels was the producing director and Wendy Patten was the stage manager.

 
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