The Force Gets Groovy With The Star Wars Musical!

The times in London is reporting that Lucasfilm has authorized: “Star Wars: A Musical Journey.” The show will will combine excerpts of the film with live orchestral accompaniment.

Diehard fans may dream of Jedi Knights serenading Jabba the Hut and C-3PO singing “Don’t cry for me, R2D2” – but they are likely to be disappointed. Producers for the show, which will have its world premiere in Britain, emphasized that although actors would be used to narrate the story, it would not be a stage musical.

the show will condense more than thirteen hours of movies into just 90 minutes of film, and will be performed on a 90 foot screen with a live classical orchestra in the pit… no, not the sarlac pit.

The audience at the 17,000-seat venue will watch key scenes from the film as 86 musicians from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra play extracts from John Williams’s score. Spencer Churchill, a producer, said that the running order of the scenes was still being finalized. “We’ve worked out most of it,” he said. “We originally thought it would be a chronological telling of the six films . . . but it is not as precise as that.”

Scenes that have survived include the destruction of the Death Star, love scenes between Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala and several battle scenes featuring tiny single-seater spacecraft swarming around vast battleships. Star Wars purists who decried the introduction of computer-generated characters in the later films in the franchise may be disappointed. Jar Jar Binks, a swamp monster with a singsong voice, is included in the piece.

For some, this just looks like another money grab for Lucas. They may be right, or this might end up being really cool. Let’s take a look at how much money he’s actually taken in over the years.

$4.5bn – Total box office takings of the six Star Wars films

$9bn – Total merchandise sales

$11m – Budget of the original 1977 film

$115m – Budget of Revenge of the Sith, released in 2005

2 – Pieces of merchandise in George Lucas’s office, namely an R2D2 cookie jar and a Wookiee mug