Denver Comic Con 2017 Panel Spotlight: 'Shakespearean Wars in the Stars'

Written by Tim Girard

Shakespearean Wars in the Stars
Friday 7:00PM - 7:50PM Room 505 - Reel Heroes Film Series
​Ernie Quiroz, Stacy Quiroz, Neil Truglio, Derek Nason, Andy Ray, Nicolas Horn, Dan O’Neil, Parker Jenkins, Chantelle Frazier.

With a beginning like “A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away”, it feels like our favorite film franchise could have been written by The Bard. Join the Denver Film Society as we see what ‘Star Wars’ could have looked like on a stage with actors taking inspiration from arguably the world’s greatest playwright.

On the Friday night of Denver Comic Con weekend, members of the Denver Film Society performed a reading of the book 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope' by Ian Doescher (which is a retelling of ‘A New Hope’ as if Shakespeare had written it). They began by recruiting some audience members for a few key roles, including Greedo (which I was NOT selected for, unfortunately), and the audience as a whole was instructed to be the voice of Chewbacca. They also explained that, in keeping with the tradition of the times, there were only male actors...which meant that Princess Leia was going to be played by a man. With only a handful of actors, that meant that each one would play multiple roles. There was also a soundtrack provided in the form of the original score being played on vinyl.

Shortly after the show began, they revealed an added layer to their performance: their use of props. They had toy laser guns for the sounds of blasters, and when Darth Vader first spoke, his deep robotic voice was enhanced by a megaphone with voice modulating effects. Similar effects were also used when any of the Stormtroopers spoke and also when anyone use a communicator, Luke calling C-3PO when he was in the trash compactor, X-Wing pilots, etc..
 
All of the voice acting was top-notch. The (male) actor voicing Princess Leia used a beautiful, yet authoritative falsetto, while the actor playing R2-D2 whistled all of his lines (and at one point stood up exasperated and made a comic outburst about being a trained actor who was only getting to whistle). Luke was appropriately whiney, and the actor who played C-3PO captured his soft-spoken, articulate voice perfectly. Obi-Wan Kenobi announced his appearance when the actor playing him comically tossed his hood up over his head… and half of his face.
 
In the Mos Eisley Cantina scene, we met Han Solo, and the audience had our collective-voice-acting debut as Chewbacca. After Luke and Obi-Wan left, the chosen audience member came up to a mic to deliver all of Greedo’s alien dialogue. When Han shot Greedo (first), it signaled the end of the Cantina scene. This ‘should’ have been followed by the deleted-then-re-inserted scene with Jabba the Hutt talking to Han outside the Millennium Falcon, but as the actor playing Jabba the Hutt began to walk on stage, delivering his first line, the cast ‘booed’ him off. The audience laughed, realizing that this was the cast’s way of showing their disapproval of that scene.
 
The next memorable moment was the confrontation between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi. The two characters stood up and incorporated a makeshift lightsaber fight across the other seated actors while still delivering Shakespearean dialogue. After Obi-Wan’s death (spoiler alert…), the full cast revealed the mightiest, most impressive of their performance-enhancing props when they performed ‘The Force Theme’…with an orchestra of kazoos.
 
After Obi-Wan’s death scene and the buzzing majesty that followed, it was about 7:45, meaning they technically only had five minutes before the end of the panel. I thought that they were going to end there, but instead, they decided to push through and try to finish in a hurry. It was like watching the rest of Star Wars on fast-forward (or as performed by the Micro Machines Man). They were all still in character, but they were spitting the dialogue as fast as they could. Luke squeezed in one more monologue before heading into the trenches in his X-Wing and destroying the Death Star. Their performance concluded with a return of the kazoo orchestra to perform the ‘Throne Room Them’ for the award ceremony, and the audience giving one final howl as Chewbacca.

Next: The Music of Wonder Woman (and some other bad-ass women).