In a world of multi-million dollar science-fiction movies, it’s a brave amateur theatre group who takes on a supposed ‘out of this world’ musical play that was intended to parody the much-loved TV series (and subsequent movies) of ‘Star Trek’. John Gardiner also wrote ‘The Dracula Spectacula’ which Workshop performed back in 1977, and would again, no doubt (at least in part) why Chris Argles chose it to direct. However, like its predecessor, the story is only very loosely based on its source material.
At some point in a far-flung future, Sam Galactic of the Star Blade Squadron is welcomed as a hero by Sekurikor, the President of Homeworld, and entrusted with his first command, that of the starship Sunburster One. He and his crew are then given the relatively mundane task of taking the president’s daughter, Dazzle Star, to a finishing school on Procyon. En route, they are intercepted by a Red Star vessel commanded by Big Olga, and then have Dazzle Star kidnapped by spacefaring Irish pirates, before finding out the true purpose of the mission. To complete it, and guarantee the future of mankind, Sam and Dazzle Star must throw themselves back in time to the 1960’s and survive an unlikely encounter with a greasy, leather-clad motorcycle gang led by the daunting Sue Zuki.
Of course, that’s only how it started out. Though the story may have remained much the same, Workshop took exception to a lot of the treatment meted out to the various characters. In the script, the ship’s doctor inexplicably sounded like one-time world champion boxer Muhammad Ali. That went. The random Irish pirates were ditched in favour of the classic Trek villains, Klingons, with all the gags that you can imagine the name entails, and their song became a spoof of ‘Pink Elephants On Parade’ from Walt Disney’s ‘Dumbo’ (Why? Ask Mark Taylor. But it was great fun.).The captain developed a middle initial to become Sam T Galactic. The ship lost a number and gained a ‘USS’ prefix, and the set of the ship’s bridge was as close to an exact copy of the original Enterprise as our limited budget could manage. The wardrobe guidelines were thrown out too, and in came fairly faithful reproductions of the classic Starfleet uniforms.
We boldly went where Samuel French didn’t expect us to go.
