Charles Ross has been taking the original Star Wars trilogy to the stage for over a decade. He writes and performs the show all by himself. Playing all of the characters. Making all of the sound effects and humming all of the music.
“There’s very few things outside of religious texts that I think people have had such an intense relationship with like they have with Star Wars," Ross says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI6HxUueYhU
Ross grew up on a farm in rural Canada. His friends live miles away and his only real entertainment options were the radio and the few VHS tapes his family owned. One of them? The first Star Wars film.
As a kid, he would watch the movie constantly. His mom tallied it up to over 400 viewings, even if some were just on as background noise.
When he got to college, he’d decided to be an actor. As an experiment, he condensed the first Star Wars film down to just twenty-five minutes.
It had all of the characters, performed by Charles himself.
Soon he decided to add the next two films and his show was complete.
As the sole performer on stage, Ross has to switch between characters quickly and accurately, all while advancing the plot and making the show entertaining.
Ross says it’s important to edit down the story to keep the plot going forward, but also keep enough in that everyone can understand what’s happening onstage. There weren’t many moments that he had to cut that he felt were important.
“A lot of the iconic moments that I really wanted, I did keep in. It was really important to try to get everything that I think people remember.”
There are so many characters and languages in the Star Wars universe. At one point in the films, C-3PO, human-cyborg relations, says he can speak over six million. Ross has spent a lot of time perfecting each character, voice and language that he needs in his show.
“Ever since I was a kid I worked on the (R2-D2 NOISE) thing, because that was something I was really trying to get the sound of R2-D2. I used to be much better at the bleeps and blops when I was a kid. Getting the whistles is important.”
Ross has obviously been a Star Wars fan his whole life. He feels a duty and obligation to perform the show with conviction each night. He wants to give the fans and those who know nothing about Star Wars a solid depiction of the movie. And without those devoted fans, his show wouldn’t be much of anything.
“Somebody did describe it to me that it was like preaching to the converted, and it is," he says. "Without Star Wars being a god of some sort, some sort of deity, it’s just a piece of fiction. Yet, people have this unique relationship with this piece of fiction, these films.”
One Man Star Wars starts at 8 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House on Friday.
