Village Theatre’s Blog

It’s coming! May 23-25, 2008 at Village Theatre’s First Stage in workshop form.

We asked writers Fred Landau and Skip Kennon what first inspired them to create the musical The Last Starfighter?

FRED: The far-back beginnings were when I was just a year out of law school. The film The Last Starfighter came out, with a video game being a testing ground for greatness. That hooked into the idea that something you’d least expect to change your life would somehow change your life. It was a message I needed to hear and feel at the time, and it hit me almost right away that this was something that could be a subject for a musical - the story of the “little guy” placed in an extraordinary situation. I pretty much filed the idea away in my mind, until I became a student in the BMI Workshop about ten years later…

SKIP: When I had first seen the film, I’d also thought the material could make a terrific musical, but was sure I couldn’t get the rights. Fred had been presenting The Last Starfighter at the BMI Workshop, first in Maury Yeston and Susan Schulman’s workshop classes, then in Nancy Golladay’s class, and after a while, he showed me what he had done. Once we had a sense that we could tell Jonathan Betuel’s story in stage terms, and that we were the right ones to work on it together, Fred and our agent made the basic inquiries and found out the rights to musicalize the screenplay might be available. So I jumped at the chance to work on it, and we decided to pursue the rights together.

More information on the workshop presentation can be found here: http://www.villagetheatre.org/vo_last-starfighter-08.shtml