I don’t pretend to understand how musicals are developed, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how you could possibly turn an old cheesy sci-fi movie into an off-Broadway musical.
A musical version of the 1984 SF movie The Last Starfighter takes the boards in an off-Broadway production at New York’s Storm Theatre, Oct. 15-30, Playbill Online reported. Lyricist-composer Skip Kennon (Time and Again) based the musical on Jonathan Betuel’s screenplay, about a teenage video-game player enlisted to save the universe. Fred Landau wrote the libretto, the site reported. Storm artistic director Peter Dobbins directs.
Have these people seen this movie? I mean, it’s fun for what it is, but what the hell are they going to sing about?? The challenge of defeating level 47 of the video game? Just when should he make use of the Death Bloom attack? What??
This just shows me that people who go to musicals don’t really care what the story is about as long as they can act all snooty because they go to musicals and thus supposedly have more class than the rest of us.
Posted on 09/27/2004 at 02:27 PM 
Posted on 09/28/2004 at 12:31 AM 
I’m sure the writer is doing this tongue in cheek. There’s plenty of wacky musicals out there you never hear of.
I’ve considered doing a series of musicals based on movies under the working title “Double Feature Musical Theatre”. To start, I want to adapt “The Birds”, but from the birds perspective, and they sing and dance. “Mommie Dearest” is even more tempting. All the films would cut to 30 minute plays, the more outrageous the better.