O2-D2

AKA “Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Side”.

Last night, I got the chance to see the world premiere of “Star Wars:A Musical Journey” at the o2 arena in London.  As I sorted out my pass, the area around the venue was filled with rather giddy parents, over-enthusiastically pulling their kids over to see Boba Fett and Chewbacca in the exhibition of items from the films. It really is a religion to these people as became apparent when the show began.

The 20th Century Fox theme rang out, the curtain dropped and the 86-piece Royal Philharmonic orchestra and choir broke into a short medley of some of the musical highlights from the six films. An audience member sat near to me looked as though he was about to break into gospel-style “overcome with the power of the lord” dancing in the aisles as he rocked backwards and forwards, applauding every clip that was shown. After the opening section, Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) was introduced and began his job for the evening of providing live narration for the various themes and the film’s story.

With Lucasfilm only allowing five minutes of shooting from a fixed position, I was then “forced” to rush around the back of the stage and find a seat in the crowd to edit.  I must admit, it’s quite a nice change to have an orchestra perform the “Cantina band” song for you as you work!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 11:37 am. It is filed under The working day and tagged with anthony daniels, boba fett, c-3po, c3p0, cantina band, darth maul, ewan mcgregor, film, george lucas, london, lucasfilm, o2, philharmonic, r2d2, review, royal philharmonic orchestra, RPO, sci-fi, science fiction, star wars, Star Wars: A musical journey, Star Wars:Musical Journey, yoda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.