laura_seabrook | Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds

I just finished watching the DVD of the War of the Worlds stage show.

Apart from acrobatics coping and juggling dogs about (Bobby was continually evading Hallie when neither was settled) I was rather impressed by how well it appeared to be done (can't be 100% certain as I missed the tour).

The strangest thing about it was the way they posthumously inserted Richard Burton into the show. They had his recorded voice from the original album and a photo of him from from when he was the same age as the character he read - the reporter George Herbert. What they did was find an actor who vaguely resembled him in the lower part of the face, and film him miming the original recorded voice, and used a computer to patch this in to other parts of Burton's photo.

In the stage production, it gets projected onto a huge sculpted head and gives the illusion of a giant head narrating the story. The IMDB data credits Richard Burton as "George Herbert, The Journalist (archive sound)" and also credits Aaron Robson as "Richard Burton"!

Interesting though also a tad creepy. It reminds me of the way that Lawrence Olivier was grafted into Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow using archive footage.

Wish I'd made the show!