Don’t let Charlie Ross’ four-day stand at our grand, state-of-the-art Long Center fool you into thinking that his One-Man Star Wars Trilogy is some technological spectacular worthy of Industrial Light & Magic. His onstage condensation of George Lucas’ myth-terful original trilogy comes just as advertised: one guy playing all the films’ characters, doing all their voices, re-creating all the science-fiction-y sound effects – and visual effects, too – with just his body, face, and mouth. It’s the sort of barest-bones theatre that would be right at home at FronteraFest. And actually, that’s what the Lucasfilm overlords like about it.
You read that right: George Lucas and the folks who control everything Star Wars, who more typically do to unauthorized Star Wars projects what the Empire did to Alderaan, took a shine to Ross’ one-man tribute and gave it their full endorsement. And that’s what has allowed the young Canadian actor to have kept the show going for eight years now, logging more than 1,200 performances of it in venues across the United States, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, New Zealand, Australia, and even at Lucasfilm’s own Star Wars conventions. As Ross explained in an article for Canadian Theatre Review last year, he had only just broken beyond gigging the show around to Canadian fringe festivals, art galleries, and rural elementary schools in British Columbia when he received a three-sentence email from Lucasfilm, indicating that they knew of his little solo show and wanted to discuss “a ‘project'” with him. Having known a theatre troupe that had had its Star Wars musical annihilated by the corporation, Ross was certain that Lucasfilm would be “suing [him] into oblivion.” “In Canada,” he writes, “work lasts for a while; you go anywhere to do it, and eventually you move on. Had I sold Darth Vader ice cream bars or franchised the show out to legions of aspiring überdorks, things would have ended abruptly. Luckily, I’d maintained the intimate quality of the show and its simplicity. It was a fan’s celebration of Star Wars.” When Ross’ “audition” – a performance for an audience of 4,000 – was received enthusiastically, his “low-tech love song” to the first trilogy earned the approval of Lucasfilm.
And here Ross is, fresh off a 30-stop tour across England, playing a 2,400-seat concert hall for six performances. On the one hand, those days of schlepping his show to grade schools in Western Canada may seem “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” but Ross is still doing what he did then: simply and full-heartedly recovering what he calls “the genuine love, the uncensored fanatical gusto reserved for 8-year-olds and lunatics” and sharing it from the stage with eager audiences.
One-Man Star Wars Trilogy will be performed Thursday, June 2, 7:30pm; Friday, June 3, 8pm; Saturday, June 4, 2 & 8pm; and Sunday, June 5, 2 & 7pm, in Dell Hall at the Long Center, 701 W. Riverside. For more information, call 474-5664 or visit www.thelongcenter.org.
This article appears in June 3 • 2011.