Team Starkid, a Los Angeles-based theater company, forges a new path for professional musical theater with their equally hilarious and heart-wrenching musicals which hold strong appeal to their ever-growing audience. Due to the group’s beautifully-composed songs, clever dialogue and engaging storylines, the company holds the attention of viewers across the world, with hundreds of thousands of fans keeping up with their latest projects. Unlike standard professional theater companies, Starkid uploads all their musicals free to watch on YouTube, ensuring that all fans can access their creations regardless of location or financial standing.
The group emerged from humble beginnings as a ragtag group of University of Michigan students assembling together to put on low-budget parodies and satirical musicals for their friends and families. The entourage put on their first production “A Very Potter Musical” in 2009 and posted it on YouTube, thinking little of the comedic work. The creative musical’s take on the Harry Potter series experienced virality immediately, soaring to almost 20 million views. In the following years from 2011 to 2016, the company speedily released numerous hit musicals.
In 2011, the group delivered “Starship” to the world, an outer-space spectacular accounting the story of an extraterrestrial bug with spectacular dreams. Starship demonstrated the uniqueness of the group’s productions due to its brilliant fusion between puppetry and non-puppet actors on stage, showcasing an otherworldly collision between two distinct worlds. In 2013, Starkid produced one of their fan-favorite shows to this day — “Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier”, a humorous yet heartwarming parody of the beloved story “Aladdin”. The musical flips the tale on its head with its creative adaptation, portraying the story’s villain Jafar as a well-meaning protagonist. During this time, the group spent time not only on the production of these immersive musicals but also on traveling the globe for multiple tours of their music and performing for fans across the world.
Additionally, Starkid’s tendencies to feature casts limited in number, usually consisting of the same actors repeatedly, factors into the group’s unparalleled individualism. This practice allows the audience to familiarize themselves with the actors they see in their favorite shows and witness the unmatched versatility and talent that the cast members possess. With each Starkid show containing such variety, the vast array of characters allows each performer a multitude of opportunities to develop their characterization skills, with actors adopting accents, specific mannerisms and master gestures to bring their characters to life.
“Starkid’s [continual] use of the same actors in every show is really what connects me to the group. I love how the viewers bond [with] and get attached [to] Starkid due to them having some of the same actors since the beginning of 2008. Lauren Lopez is my favorite Starkid actor. [Lopez] plays some of my all-time favorite characters in Starkid musicals such as Emma, Malfoy, Ruth and Zazzalil. The way she can go from a sassy little boy to a heroic grown woman is what I love about her,” sophomore Katelyn Mckoon said.
Starting in 2018, Starkid launched their grandest original project, a thrilling horror-comedy series entitled “Hatchetfield Trilogy.” Named after the close-knit town the shows take place in, each addition to the trilogy tells a unique story with all three tied together through shared characters, settings and motifs. The first musical of the series, “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals” entertainingly pokes fun at the concept of musicals themselves in a humorous manner that can bring entertainment to non-musical lovers and diehard fans alike, all the while serving an action-filled plot to keep audiences eagerly engaged. The second installment, entitled “Black Friday,” takes on a creepy yet lively perspective on holiday shopping and provides numerous twists and turns that leave viewers enthralled with a mysterious open-to-interpretation ending. Before Starkid finished the third installment of the series, COVID-19 hit, bringing production to an immediate halt. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the group took on a Hatchetfield-related project, creating a Zoom series telling the stories of characters in previous musicals and providing context for the events that took place.
The unconventional addition to the series created an unprecedented amount of fanbase involvement, letting fans speculate and converse with one another about the open-to-interpretation aspects of the musicals. Finally, in 2023, Starkid released the final installment of the iconic trilogy, entitled “Nerdy Prudes Must Die”. The musical takes a stark turn from the previous installments, entertainingly following the stories of a group of geeky outcasts in a local high school who accidentally land in a sticky, supernatural situation. The show received an extremely positive reception, leaving fans beyond satisfied with the end of a thrilling five-year-long saga.
“I love the Hatchetfield trilogy because the music is so good and they connect to each other so well, and of course, they’re really funny. I think the musicals create so many [opportunities for] fan theories and I think that’s why [their fanbase] always looks forward to the next one in the trilogy,” magnet junior Seren Witschy said.
Team Starkid recently wrapped their production entitled “Cinderella’s Castle,” sending a nod to their parody and puppetry roots, while still maintaining their recent stylistic vibe. Although not yet publicly released on YouTube, viewers from across the globe highly anticipate and support the musical. Before the musical’s creation, Starkid launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the show. The campaign reached immediate success, earning a whopping total of $529,230. Audiences anxiously await the show’s YouTube release, thousands of fans even travel to Los Angeles to see the show live or buy Starkid’s digital ticket for $15 to watch an initial recording of the show.
Starkid refrains from announcing its next plans for a musical, however, the company surely holds several new ideas up its sleeves to continue adding its own personal mark on the theater world. The group currently boasts more popularity than ever before and remains rising in the ranks among off-broadway professional theater companies.
