Like many others, my holiday season in 2015 began with a screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Unlike many others, I didn’t particularly enjoy it. In fact, as a long time fan of the franchise, it pained me deeply to see such a shameless rehashing lauded as the new installment in the saga.
My response, I wrote a musical, to be performed by my high school’s student theatre club that year in May. I centered it around the life and times of Han Solo and pointed its satirical plot at the consequences of stretching a franchise too thin through constant and never ending expansion.
Since the overarching theme of this website is the development of my musical style, I’ll set aside the script for now to focus on my music and lyric writing for Solo. In this, my first score, I split the difference between wholly original music and plays on existing musical motifs and styles. These range from the incorporation of two star wars love themes for the jazz waltz “I know” to the rip off of Les Miserable’s “One Day More” for the thematic parody “One Star War”. This culminated in a 10 song score that was fresh an entertaining, if not genuinely original through and through.
I grew considerably through the process of writing and directing solo, and more than anything else it primed me for a far more ambitious venture into musical theatre the following year.
Unfortunately, the full video of Solo has been lost to time, but here are a few remaining snippets of songs that represent my musical style at the time.