All tagged Starmites
Last week, while I was enjoying some time off, I decided to take a little sojourn to Pennsylvania. I gathered a few old theatre friends from my college days to accompany me, musical theatre folk who love to blast a showtune in the car and sing along. Knowing that they would expect me to be the DJ for this outing, I assembled a playlist full of the perfect songs for this kind of thing. I find the best songs for a road trip fall into one of three categories...
Considering the final products of both the LIVE television productions of The Sound of Music and Peter Pan in the last two years, I probably wouldn’t wish this format on any musical. I do, however, think that taking musicals with iconic, beloved film or television versions and recreating them as live television productions is just asking for trouble. People adore Julie Andrews’s in The Sound of Music, Carrie Underwood as Maria Von Trapp was bound to pale in comparison, no matter how hard she tried.
A musical that doesn’t get brought up or produced nearly as much as it ought to is the campy and sublime, comic book-inspired Starmites. With music and lyrics by Barry Keating and a book by Stuart Ross and Keating, the piece follows Eleanor, an introverted teenager with a love for comic books, who imagines herself as the heroine sent to save the universe as part of an intergalactic band of guardian angels known as the “Starmites”
