Star Wars, the Concert: In An Arena Far, Far Away

We just caught wind of a fascinating arena show that’s now touring the country – a major multimedia spectacle wrapped around the universe of “Star Wars.”

It’s called “Star Wars: In Concert,” and tonight it sets up shop in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, before moving on to Baltimore, New Jersey and New York City.

At first blush, it’s a concept that left me skeptical: How exactly can they convert 12 hours of filmmaking into an arena symphony show worth seeing? But the closer you look at all the fine print, this more intriguing this thing becomes. Lucasfilm has collaborated in editing down the film franchise into a handful of thematic segments, John Williams’s score has then been reconfigured to match these themes, and Anthony Daniels – C-3PO himself – has been brought in to provide narration, glueing the various pieces together.

All this has then been paired with one towering movie screen, a full symphony, a live choir, and a traveling museum exhibit stocked full of “Star Wars” musical memorabilia.

The scope of it all impressed me. And then I came upon this video which really breaks down the production, revealing all the effort that’s gone into this big-league musical celebration. I think I’m going to do a little more digging, to see what this touring show is like, but what do you all think? Sort of impressive, no?

usesherbrain

PBS did a behind the scenes special on this mid-Octoberish, and it absolutely blew me away.

The most interesting part isn’t that they chopped up the musical themes to produce complete symphony pieces, but that they did it in reverse. They started with determine which musical themes were important enough to cover in a symphonic setting, then chopped all of the movies up to complement the thematic flourishes.

Not to mention, after editing the movies down to work with the music (the PBS coverage showed a segment that flashed from a scene in TPM to a scene in ESB to a scene in AOTC for Anakin’s fight music from ROTS), there’s the added difficulty of pairing up a live orchestra with pre-determined video segments.

All of the video work was timed to flow with the accents and dynamics of the music, so the conductor is not just following a score, but essentially also a red bouncing ball of a metronome on his video screen, overlaid with the score and the video work being shown. Talk about multi-tasking. There’s less flexibility for the conductor (and Mr. Daniels!) to take artistic license, so it is exceptionally impressive from a musical-theater nerd perspective.

Also, Star Wars on the jumbo-tron FTW.
Steven James Snyder

Wow – very cool, I might need to set up an interview with these people. Back in October, huh? I hadn’t heard about it until just recently….thanks for all the info!
http://hotoutoftheoven.wordpress.com hotoutoftheoven

I also saw the special on PBS – very impressive and I’m thinking worth the time and effort to see the concert.
mrkospender

I saw this show in Tampa a few weeks ago and it was fantastic. It took movies and characters I’ve seen millions of times and made them new again. The screen and lights are impressive. The sound was surprisingly great for a hockey arena. It was well worth attending.
http://jmmath.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/best-web-junk-november-20/ Best Web Junk (November 20) « Jeremy’s Weblog

[...] I really want to go to this. Seriously, I very much want to go. But it’s not coming anywhere close to me. I only heard about it this week and apparently I missed it in Charlotte. If I could figure out how to be gone for Christmas that early, I’d try to see it in Nashville on the 13th. [...]