Written by Dale Wasserman
Music and Lyrics by
Bill Francoeur and Scott DeTurk

When hoboing through Colorado sometimes I’d drop off my designated freight train and go backpacking into the mountains. I was surprised by the number of ghost towns I’d run across — little left but rotting planks, inhabited only by lizards and packrats. At night I’d lie awake beneath the stars, imagining these towns as once they must have been and wondering why some survived and others came to these melancholy ends.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Eastward I go only by force, but Westward I go free." But did these people "go free?" Or in their baggage was included the defects of character which led them to abandon the East? The folks who went West were not the clear-eyed pioneers of Hollywood fame -- in general they were bankrupts, jailbirds, floozies, crooks and con-men fleeing failure or prison.

Out of these wonderings was born "Western Star," a musical speculation on the magnet that drew such people West, and of their trials when they got there.

The musical score, written by Bill Francoeur and Scott DeTurk, is perfectly wonderful, I claim, and wonderfully melodic and singable. It's available on a fully orchestrated demo disc from Music Theatre International -- as is the script.