Show notes
Long, long ago, in the Miracle Mile Shops far, far, away…
All right, so if you and the listeners haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a big dork. In my youth, I enjoyed video games, Star Wars, and installing A/V equipment so much that it’s a wonder I ever got laid. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve shifted my dorky obsessions to things like bourbon and Vegas, but I’m still a dork. So when it was announced that the show “A Musical About Star Wars” was coming to the Miracle Mile Shops, I had to check it out. Over the holidays I grabbed a pair of tickets and we went to see it.
Some background on the show: While I had never heard of the show before it was announced that it was coming to Vegas, it has been around for a few years. It premiered off-Broadway in New York back in 2019, and one of the stars of the Vegas version is a co-writer, and he was also part of the original cast.
Let’s just get this out of the way: the comparisons to Potted Potter playing at the Horseshoe are inevitable. Both shows are in relatively small venues, with small casts, and cover similarly expansive series with obsessed fan cultures. In A Musical About Star Wars, the cast is small, with only three performers; Potted Potter has two. Unfortunately, one of these shows works better than the other.
I think the biggest issue I had with A Musical About Star Wars is how accessible the humor is. In Potted Potter, you didn’t have to be a big fan of the material to get most of the jokes. Most of the humor in Potted Potter is in the execution, in the journey to try to tell all these stories in 80 minutes. In A Musical About Star Wars, the humor is in the source material. Most of the jokes are about the content of the films, and the result is that only big fans will find a lot of the jokes funny.
For example, there’s this recurring bit where the two guys in the show speak to each other mimicking some of the alien languages spoken in the movies. They’re repeating actual dialogue from the movies, and it’s supposed to be funny, but comes across as so cringy. Watching it, I just end up feeling embarrassed for my fellow Star Wars nerds. Even the subtitle of the show is cringey. The full title of the show is “A Musical About Star Wars, or Why Star Wars Is The Greatest Thing To Ever Happen In The History Of The Galaxy And Is Much, Much, Better Than Star Trek.” If you’re going to make a show that you need to be a huge fan to enjoy, why would you make the characters who are fans in your show so stunningly awkward? They even get nervous about talking to the female character. It’s just riddled with simple, unfunny nerd cliches.
The other issue I had with the show might have more to do with me than the show. So I am somewhat hard of hearing. I watch TV with the subtitles on. It’s not severe; I spend about half of my work day talking on the phone, and my hearing loss doesn’t really affect my ability to do my job. You’ve heard enough of my reviews to know I don’t really have any issues with this when it comes to Vegas entertainment. But I could not for the life of me hear about three quarters of the dialogue and singing in this show. I think this is probably due to a variety of factors, including my hearing trouble. I think their sound system sucked. You probably don’t get the best audio quality in the theater at the mall. Wait, actually, it’s the backup theater at the mall. Through most of the show, you got 2-3 people singing at the same time. They’re singing the same things, but they are going kind of fast and they aren’t perfectly in sync. Couple this with the bad sound system and my bad hearing, and I couldn’t really hear what they were saying. I don’t think this was just me; I didn’t hear a lot of people laughing at lines that I was missing.
The premise of the show is also similar to Potted Potter. There’s kind of a show within a show, with the two male cast members trying to get their Star Wars play shown at Comic-con Las Vegas. They need a real, actual, girl for the female roles, and that's where the other cast member comes in. Except she doesn’t really want to be there, and thinks Star Wars is stupid and sexist.
It’s not all terrible, there’s a few parts that work really well. When they cover the Star Wars prequels, they decide to tell the stories of episodes 1-3 “Hamilton style.” They parody the rap style from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, which in itself is funny, but the spoken method also means more of the jokes can be heard.
The show is in the V Theater, at the back of the Miracle Mile Shops, next to Flights. I haven’t seen any other shows here but I think this isn’t even the main “V” Theater, I think it’s their secondary theater. We had to wait in line on a flight of stairs to enter, while they tried to do that thing where every party has stop in front of a green screen to get their pictures taken. Super annoying. Oh, and when we exited and they were trying to sell everyone their finished pictures, they weren’t even related to the show. The green-screened background was the Vegas skyline.
If you do decide to see the show, I recommend center seats. The venue is very wide, but only goes a few rows back. The stage is raised, so it’s better to be in the center back than on the front row but the far edge.
The Audience Fuckery Factor for this show is minimal. They can’t even talk to girls. They aren’t going to venture out into the audience and talk to you.
If you and everyone else in your party have excellent hearing and are Star Wars fans, maybe give it a shot. The show plays daily at 4:30 at the “V” theater at the Miracle Mile Shops. Tickets start at $29. We always appreciate it when you purchase your tickets from vegas.com via the link on the blog or here in the show notes.