<b>KHAN!!! The Musical!</b> Shea's Smith Theatre/O'Connell & Company SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Through January 26T
KHAN!!! The Musical! Shea’s Smith Theatre/O’Connell & Company

By Augustine Warner

One of the premises of “Star Trek,” particularly in the original series, is the need to explore and meet other people in what is often shown as a relatively peaceful galaxy.
The later series and streaming shows portray a much more violent mass of star systems, with major wars and enormous death totals.
This takes place across centuries, depending on what of the array of programs you are looking at.
Brent Black and Alina Roth’s <b is a mashup of various iterations, from Captain Kirk in the original show and Khan from TV and one of the better movies from the universe founded by Gene Roddenberry to Lt. Com. Data, the sentient android of <b
As an AI¸ Data is fascinated by the people around him and since he has 24/7 time to study them, he decides to see them through the lens of musical theater.
That’s a very rare component of “Star Trek,” but it does occur
Now, you don’t have to be familiar with Roddenberry World, although it does help.
You meet Data and the crew of the original show and the Enterprise they staffed, Kirk, Spock and the rest, leavened by characters from other series and movies.
And, in turn, they go back to the Academy and their time working the starship Kobayashi Maru.
That’s a training scenario which is a no-win, used to evaluate how cadets handle a lethal situation, often not well.
When Cadet James T. Kirk flew the Kobayashi Maru at the academy, he escaped doom by cheating, a feat remembered in this show by the song “Kobayashi Maru.”
Show creators Brent Black and Alina Roth use this to lead into an aged and failing Kirk (John Kreuzer), worn out by years in the fleet and mentally torn by concerns that not everything he did was the right thing to do.
That’s where Khan Noonien Singh comes in.
15 years before, Kirk had defeated Khan (Len Mendez) and put the violent and genetically enhanced human and his family and followers on a remote planet and never went back
The good Earth-like planet went bad and many of Khan’s followers and his family died.
Now, the starship Enterprise wandered by, with an aging Admiral Kirk supervising Captain Spock’s command of a training cruise from Starfleet Academy.
It’s red meat for Khan, seeking revenge for what happened.
Once Kirk and Khan confront each other, the despondent admiral begins to regain his command footing, perhaps “Have I Still Got the Magic?”
He takes over for Spock, highly visible on Reuben Julius Schwartz’ set.
It gives Vinny Murphy an opportunity to demonstrate real skill at tap dancing, while reminding Kirk and the cast of some basic Vulcan attitudes, “The Needs of the Many.”
There’s also the plot element of Kirk’s great love, Dr. Carol Marcus (Audrianna Yates) and the son he never knew about, two of the researchers in the core of an isolated planet working on the “Genesis” machine to terraform a planet.
Khan wants it because it can destroy a planet.
The entire story is surrounded by Joey Bucheker’s strong choreography.
He’s also Chekhov, the Russian on the navigation desk.
The show is a fascinating matching of the music and fine dancing paired with the violence of the duel between Kirk and Khan.
It’s also a look at issues not usually on the TV of any shows in the long series, a song like “When the Chickens Come Home” from Kirk.
Director Daniel F. Lendzian has a strong cast to work with, like Greenan’s Data, Kreuzer, Mendez and Ashleigh Chrisena Ricci’s Saavik.
There’s Schwartz’ set, Timmy Goodman’s costumes and Bucheker’s choreography.
Backing it up are the video projections from Todd Warfield, who actually worked on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” as a designer, when productions were much less high tech.
The obvious question about the show is: Do I have to be a “trekker” to understand what’s going on?
You don’t, because the guy sitting next to me isn’t and he enjoyed it.
That’s why “Khan!!! The Musical!” is worth seeing for anyone, where you understand all of the different Enterprise versions or not.