One Man Star Wars Trilogy: 3 3/4 Stars With a Wookie

Woke up this morning, staggered upstairs to get the paper and fell into this view. What a gorgeous place we live in, when the rain stops.

TGP and TGD had coffee yesterday afternoon with The Great Dancenik on her last day on the West Coast before returning to the Big Shmapple. She may look like a cosmopolitan N'yawkuh now, but she's still got California in her bones. It was cold and windy in Farley's, as always, but the company was grand, and the turkey/provolone/cranberry sauce sandwich from next door is Aces.



Now, back to business. Last night, The Great Plotnik and The Great Ducknik saw 'One Man Star Wars Trilogy' at the Post St. Theatre, which is heartily recommended to anyone who saw the first three Star Wars movies and memorized every line and every gesture, like Charles Ross did. The show is an absolute tour de force for one man performance and for Star Wars fanatics and for Ross, who also does a one hour One Man Lord Of The Rings show, or did, until the Cease and Desist Order, apparently.

Just one guy in a jump suit on a large stage, but he can do extraordinary things with his body and especially with sounds. He becomes Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia as well as Jabba the Hutt, Obi Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, C3PO, R2D2 and Chewbacca, air battles, starship deflector shields, the famous Wookie bar scene and the famous through-the-trees starfighter scene and the famous LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER scene and, all in all, you really start to realize what an enormous effect these films had on worldwide culture.

The Great Plotnik Theater Awards Division has been thinking about the rating for this show, and decided that 'One Man Star Wars Trilogy' gets 3 3/4 Stars with a Wookie. The performance itself is 4 Stars Plus, all the way around, and IF The Great Plotnik had seen any of the Star Wars films within the past twenty years he probably would have given Charles Ross 5 Stars. But he hadn't. So much of what was going on, and going on very, very fast as Ross spins circles around the stage, was only barely comprehensible. On the other hand, it didn't really matter, because Ross is so good and so funny, and boy, can he do that Wookie sound. The force is clearly with him, but not with the people in the first row, and that has to do with spit, you'll see.

'One Man Star Wars Trilogy' is a must see for all geeks, and for Danny, Barry and Brian when they were nine, but that's a story from a long time ago in a distant galaxy called EPark.