un-balcon-en-foret

[attention, cet article n'est pas l'habituel blabla sans queue ni tête, mais se veut être une revue culturelle.
...ah oui, et c'est en anglais]


« The Little Mermaid meets Aliens » said Darren Criss (Glee) about the new musical by his production company, StarKid.
And that’s exactly what it is.
On a planet far away from ours, Starship is the story of Bug, a bug who doesn’t want to live a boring life like the others in the hive, but wants to become…a Starship Ranger! One problem, though: he is not human. So when actual Starship Rangers start landing on his planet and when he is offered by a renegade bug to get a human body, he doesn’t hesitate …and when the future of his planet falls into his hands, he’ll prove that even a bug can makes his dreams come true and become a hero.

The adorable side characters, the numerous puns and references and the nice morals in the story, all stem from the Walt Disney tradition, the company’s main source of inspiration.

From the team who produced the viral youtube musicals A Very Potter Musical and A Very Potter Sequel, this musical is already a major success among the loyal StarKids fanbase : after its release a couple of days ago, the album from the musical is already ranked #4 on Itunes US ! (“We’ve beaten the Warblers!” the StarKids teased their songwriter, Darren Criss –who at 24 has currently two albums in the Itunes top 10#. Not so bad.) And there’s a reason to that: the songs he has written and composed are catchy and really add to the story. The singing voices of the various actors have greatly improved since the previous musical (thumbs up to Dylan Saunders whose amazing voice came as a real surprise). The work on the puppets is particularly mind-blowing: their appearance and movements are so realistic that you forget there are actors standing behind them and working them, even when some of them have another part in the play and have no time to dress up in the neutral black puppet-worker costume: Lauren Lopez who alternates from an Hispanic guerillera to a heart-broken caterpillar all through the play embodies single-handedly the concept of polyvalence.

One little hiccup though, February‘s singing voice (played by Denise Donovan): too bad that one of the main characters of a musical is unable to sing properly. However, the voices of the others make up for it…even if we would have loved to hear more of Jaime Lyn Beatty’s voice.

This group has clearly moved from “a bunch of friends having fun on stage”, as they described themselves when their first musical became viral, to a professional company of very talented writers, actors and singers. More please!

The show is available to watch for free along with the company’s other musicals on their YouTube channel : http://www.youtube.com/user/StarKidPotter

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