Why is it called starkid

Video footage from the show was posted online, and "A Very Potter Musical" began circulating within Harry Potter fandom. This led to Darren Criss, a founding member and their Harry , getting cast on "Glee" and becoming a star. Which led to most of Team StarKid settling on Chicago as a home base, working on even more shows and developing a consistent and clever, wide-eyed, pop-culture-scrounging musical theater sensibility. Which led to the self-produced soundtrack for its most recent musical, "Starship," going to No.

Which now has led to a sold-out concert tour featuring the same songs, starting Friday in Ann Arbor. The Tuesday show at the Bottom Lounge is sold out.

All of which, as of last week, has led to videos of StarKid's productions being watched million times. How promising is StarKid? It's a video so flatly produced it could have been shot by a parent with a camcorder. And yet, the screening was sold out. How did I miss this?

Ask yourself: Am I 14? Obsessed with Harry Potter? If not, your ignorance is understandable. As Brian Holden, one of the founding members, told Variety, "Our marketing team is Twitter and teenage girls telling their friends. People are like, 'Wait, you did this in school?

If they plop down in a theater space, they could. Or they could easily be a TV show. But I think the smart ones want to do it all, and they will. They've touched some nerve. They're just not on everyone's radar yet. The room resembles the set of "Rent," cluttered and randomly decorated. Heat is nonexistent. They'll sing it all back," Walker says. Saunders nods. He knows. A young two-piece band just drums and keyboards slides into spacey opening music and the cast members step onto their imaginary stage, lined up one behind the other, moving in slow, exaggerated strides as if they were malfunctioning robots or walking on the moon.

When they reach their microphone stands, the StarKids turn their backs to their imaginary audience. My brain starts to assign pithy personalities: Richter's the sensitive one; Stepien's the goof; Walker's the lady's man; Saunders is the regular schmo; Beatty's the sad-eyed cynic; Holden's the nerdy one; and choreographer Lauren Lopez is the spunky one. Fans say the same things again and again about StarKid. As year-old Allegra Rosenberg, of Skokie, put it: "It's so low-fi, it's like something I could do, with a pop lexicon to dig into.

A mishmash of pop benchmarks, not great theater. It was released in on StarKid's YouTube channel. Despite the series ending in a cliffhanger, StarKid members have confirmed at various events that there will be no season 2, as it was an expensive production and the actors who took part in it are scattered all over the country.

However, Eric Kahn Gale, one of the writers for the show, stated that he would write and publish a synopsis of season 2, which was released on September 3, , on his Tumblr page. The series takes place in an alternate world where every popular movie ever has been adapted into a Broadway musical. The best of these musicals all star the same man, Halpert Evans, a vain and pompous, though brilliant, actor.

The series is structured as a mockumentary of Evans, chronicling the most significant musical roles of his career, along with commentary from various colleagues in Halpert's line of work. Performances took place virtually on October 10, 17 and 24, The first episode was streamed and posted directly to YouTube with the final two episodes being available via digital ticket.

The final two episodes were then uploaded to YouTube on February 14, Team StarKid Wiki Explore. Team StarKid. Recent blog posts Forum. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Edit source History Talk 0. Categories Content Add category. Some of the key gags that would appear in the musical were jokes they had been floating around, and these ideas eventually drove the creation of a definitive script.

The writers — the Lang brothers and Holden — were savvy of the acting skills of close friends and classmates and often wrote the parts to fit the strengths of the actors they had in mind, a tactic they often practice in current productions. While everyone else was tied up with the show, Walker and alum Brian Rosenthal spent the time knocking out their scenes as Voldemort and Quirrell, fine-tuning the tricky blocking that comes with standing back to back for most of the first act, with their heads sharing the neck hole of a single robe.

Criss had to use the time to nail his lead role and finish writing all the music and lyrics with alum A. But aside from a few minor miscues, the first show — which was the first time it was performed seamlessly without stopping — was a success.

What a good time we had. The mostly graduated cast had gone off to start careers in New York City and Los Angeles and wanted to be able to share the show with friends and family, so the cheapness and convenience of YouTube was preferable to creating and distributing DVDs.

At the time, Walker was making a road trip from Los Angeles to New York and deciding which city to settle in.