Drew and I like to go to the theatre on occasion, mostly for comedy rather than serious performances. We also like a good musical too like Chicago or Wicked, but most definitely not The Lord of the Rings. So after I had emailed Drew that Dionne Warwick was performing at the Princess Theatre in Torquay, he rushed down there to buy himself and his mother (he’s a good boy), tickets (not for me as it’s not really me). Also bought quite a few more including tickets for Frankie Boyle and Jo Brand as well as a pair for the One Man Star Wars show starring Charles “one man” Ross.
Now you see, Drew knew I would be excited by all of these. Some more than others, but most definitely by Frankie, Jo and the One Man Star Wars show. I like Frankie because of his sometimes disgustingly un-politically correct humour, Jo for her amble bosom and love of chocolate, and finally Charles Ross in the One Man Star Wars show, because HELLO, it’s STAR WARS.
Now having bought the tickets, Drew suddenly decided that he wanted to back out of going. Perhaps it was because I didn’t want to see the Sing-a-long Hairspray that he also bought tickets for. If it was the Rikki Lake version, I’d be there, but it wasn’t, so I won’t. I now had to find someone to go with me for last Friday night’s (25th July) performance. I was thinking of asking a fellow sci-fi nerd who is a big fan of Star Wars (see Generation Star Wars), but he was out of town, so I decided to ask my fag hag Miss Mina instead. She’s not your usual type of fag hag, she’s into performing burlesque, loves sci-fi and horror and is covered in tattoos. Lucky for Drew she agreed to a night out on the town that is Torquay.
Typically things were not going smoothly that evening. The cleaner kept me talking while I wanted to to get into the shower. Drew couldn’t decided whether he was going to join us for an evening supper or not. I’d left my wallet at work, so I had to go there before picking up Miss Mina. We were running late and didn’t think we’d be able to eat, but lucky for us, our waitress for the evening was a friend of Miss Mina and we were served drinks, food and bill in half an hour. So we had a nice stroll along the promenade up to the theatre, not entirely knowing what to expect.
We handed over our tickets, bought some munchies and took to our seats. I have to say that I was surprised by the lack of people in the auditorium. Now to put things into perspective, Torquay is a small seaside town, but still, there couldn’t have been more than fifty people in the theatre. This was not looking promising…
The warm up act was a comedian by the name of Graham Clark, who like Charles Ross was Canadian. Although Graham’s routine started without much response from the audience he soon got everybody laughing. The jokes were clean, something Graham may have been struggling with, but a lot of them were specifically about Torbay and since there was only one night’s performance, he did really good. He also said “awesome”, a lot. There was a short interval so I went and bought some drinks and we settled down with munchies and liquid refreshments and waited for Charles Ross to start the One Man Star Wars show.
What we were subjected to was one of the funniest scripts and mime acting to perfectly condense and describe the original Star Wars trilogy in one hour. From the way that Charles uses his body to portray the different space craft, his arms to visually describe the opening credits and a disco ball and some stage lights to dazzle the audience when both Death Stars are destroyed, we were pretty much laughing all the way though. Peppered throughout the performance are small jokes such as Obi Wan Kenobi’s nose doing a Pinocchio when he tells Luke that his father was betrayed and murdered by Darth Vader to Han Solo asking why Leia kept of kissing Luke in the manner that she did, seeing as he is her twin.
However, despite all of this people were walking out before the end of the show. This was really sad as Charles Ross’ performance was funny and engaging. The first couple left as he was about to kick start Return of the Jedi. In fact Charles stopped the show to make light of the situation, reminding people that he’d picked the most obvious title he could think of that best describes the show One Man Star Wars. The next lot of people left just before the end of episode VI. Really stupid as they missed his Mark Hamil realisation that his last words were “Father, I won’t leave you” and that he’d never work in something as successful again.
Why did these people leave? My guess would be that they were chav scum holiday makers who had no sense of imagination or actually what they’d bought tickets for. There were still plenty of people who enjoyed Charles Ross in the One Man Star Wars show, as evidenced by the laughing in the audience.
After Charles Ross finished the final act, he sat on the stage and explained how he started with a small comedy sketch which snowballed into performing the show to four thousand people at a convention, invited to do so by Lucas Films. How he thought that Lucas would shut him down, but was embraced and allowed to continue the One Man Star Wars show (25% of the takings going to Lucas Film). And also how he started and One Man Lord of the Rings show, which Ian McKellen saw and stamped his seal of approval, only for someone (I forget who) to slap him with a cease and desist order. Charles Ross remarked that it was probably something to do with the timing and The Lord of the Rings musical about to start its run, and looked what happened to that…
I hope Charles Ross wasn’t too despondent with how he perceived the show went. Torquay is a small seaside town that is beset each summer by the worse hive of scum and villainy.
Those of us who live here all year round and are true sci-fi nerds knew what we were letting ourselves in for, and we had a fantastic time.
