While watching “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” I kept thinking of a 1979 movie called “Butch and Sundance: The Early Years.”

“Butch and Sundance: The Early Years” was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of George Roy Hill’s 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which not only made a lot of money but came to be looked at as an important contribution to American cinema.

Since the main characters (played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford) died at the end of the first film, “Butch and Sundance: The Early Years” had to be a prequel (hence the title).

It stars two fine actors who were chosen for their rough resemblance to Newman and Redford (William Katt and Tom Berenger, respectively).

After I returned from watching ‘Solo,” I Googled the late Roger Ebert’s review of “Butch and Sundance: The Early Years.”

Here’s a sizeable excerpt: “How to put it fairly? This is not a necessary film, and that’s really its most crucial shortcoming. As an exercise in filmmaking, it is technically fine…(the photography, direction and performances) are all impossible to dislike. The film even has some of the same easygoing charm (as the original).

“But as we listen to the freewheeling dialog, as we watch young (characters) blunder through their first adventures and finesse their later ones, there’s a nagging question bouncing about in the backs of our heads: Why are we in this theater at this time? Did we want to know about the early days? Now that we’re here, does the movie make us care?

“Not really.”

I know I am going to sound like a stick in the mud here, but I am not sure I was aching to see a bunch of Han Solo’s offhand remarks from the original trilogy fleshed out as scenes in a prequel.

Do we really need to see Solo make “the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.”? The fact that the comment seemed totally nonsensical to us was part of its charm, wasn’t it?

I always assumed it was an empty boast, albeit one I didn’t understand. I think I liked it better that way.

My biggest problem with “Solo,” however, is the guy who was saddled with the toughest task in it: Alden Ehrenreich.

The challenge of playing a character as indelible in American popular culture as Han Solo is exacerbated here by the added indelibility of the man who originated the role: Harrison Ford.

Ford is hardly the sort of actor who disappears into his roles. Every character he’s ever played has had a little Han Solo in him.

So what was Ehrenreich to do? Impersonate Ford?

It was a Sisyphean task and Ehrenreich did his best to perform it.

But he fell short.

I am not saying Ehrenreich is a bad actor. Far from it. He just never found a complete solution to the difficult puzzle with which he was presented.

I couldn’t help but think of Chris Pine’s miraculous resurrection of Captain Kirk while I watched “Solo.”

Mick Lasalle of the San Francisco Chronicle put it better than I could: “…although Alden Ehrenreich is appealing in his own right, there’s none of that flash of recognition we got when we first saw Chris Pine as Captain Kirk and thought, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the guy.’ Ehrenreich doesn’t really seem like Harrison Ford.”

In fact, the actor Ehrenreich most reminded me of is Jack Black.

Call me crazy, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Ehrenreich has Black’s eyes and eyebrows and Black’s way of grinning mischievously.

Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE Black. But a svelte Jack Black as Han Solo? There’s a skit in there somewhere, but not an earnest entertainment.

As I watched “Solo,” I kept having to remind myself: “Oh, yeah. This guy is supposed to be Han Solo.”

I enjoyed Donald Glover’s performance without fully accepting that he was the Lando Calrissian I had come to know.

I never got sucked into the conceit.

So my experience of watching “Solo” never rose above what I experience when I watch a highly polished fan film.

It seemed like exemplary cosplay to me. Believe me when I write that I very much wanted it to be more.

I loved many of the ancillary characters and several of the action set pieces were exciting.

Some of the Easter eggs were fun and I appreciated all the practical effects.

But I never felt like I was actually inside the “Star Wars” universe.

The fact that a lot of fans are saying online that “Solo” is a truer and purer “Star Wars” movie than “The Last Jedi” flummoxes me.

I can’t unpack it.

Do most “Star Wars” fans really want further installments to be bloodless exercises in nostalgia coddling?

Perhaps.

And regarding that plot twist at the end of “Solo” – If you really judge the return of a certain character to be more believable than Princess Leia’s space flight in “The Last Jedi,” then (to paraphrase author John Gray) you are from Mars and I am from Venus.

Or, you are from Tattooine and I am from Endor.

Yub yub.

The thing that brought Utopia back together ultimately wasn’t a burying of hatchets.

It was a surfeit of significant suitors.

Touring as a band is considerably more expensive and customarily less lucrative than touring as a solo act. So the encouragement, support, resources and deep pockets of a big-time promoter are, at the very least, enormously helpful.

Reached by phone, Todd Rundgren (Utopia’s founder and creative engine) said the band was courted by a number of major players and this helped convince him that a reunion was a good idea.

“We got a really positive response from several different promoters,” he said. “Ultimately, we went with Live Nation. It was their vote of confidence that was the real tripwire for the whole thing.”

Utopia performs at the Chicago Theatre on Tuesday night.

Rundgren has said for years that he wasn’t interested in the sort of half-ass reunion that would involve a couple of rehearsals and a couple of “greatest hits” concerts.

The current tour is the fruit of copious rehearsal time and fine-tuning.

One of the challenges of revisiting this era of Rundgren’s career was the bifurcated nature of the band.

Utopia started as a prog-rock outfit, but morphed into a more pop-friendly act.

Rundgren said revisiting the prog-rock era after all these years was daunting.

“That required the lion’s share of our rehearsal time,” he said. “Going back and trying to recapture everything that was represented in the first three albums of what we did.”

Rundgren said he initially formed Utopia as an opportunity to play guitar.

“The early records reflect that,” he said. “There’s much less singing overall and a lot more instrumentalizing.”

As his career progressed, Rundgren became “much less of a guitar player.”

“To have to go back and refocus on that messed with my brain a little,” he said. “To have to think like a guitar player.”

With all the hats he had to wear while putting this tour together, Rundgren said that the demands of the first few shows on him as a guitarist were a bit of a shock.

“Now I am starting to get back into the head of a guitar player,” he said. “I am thinking ahead instead of suddenly finding that ‘Oh, I am supposed to play this now?’ or “I am playing this now. What am I supposed to play next?’”

Rundgren said it was that way for everyone in the band.

As bassist and vocalist Kasim Sulton told Variety magazine in April: “I was just playing ‘Communion with the Sun’ earlier today and I’m like, ‘Oh man. Why did I play so many notes?’”

Each concert is structured to represent the transition that band went through, Rundgren said.

“The first set is more of the instrumental, prog-rocky stuff,” he said. “And the second set is more of the latter-day, songwriting-oriented pop stuff.”

Rundgren likens the first set to playing in a blizzard.

“Everything is coming at you so fast,” he said. “The second set seems a breeze by comparison. I kept thinking, ‘Maybe we should just do the history of the band backwards. Start at the end and work our way back to the beginning.’”

The band’s transition mirrored Rundgren’s transition into one of the more notable pop songwriters and producers of the 20^th century.

Practicality and pragmatism are what drove the band’s transition.

“We weren’t getting a lot of records on the radio,” Rundgren said. “We were always more of an album act. As long as there was album radio, we got some airplay. But as time went on, (the Bearsville record label) lost interest in the band.

“We weren’t getting the tour support which made those big shows possible,” he said. “As we got more dependent on ourselves, we started to think more economically: ‘Let’s not write these big, top-heavy songs that require pyramids.’”

Nevertheless, Rundgren said the band never lost its “conceptual flair.”

While preparing for this tour, the band suffered a seemingly catastrophic setback.

With a month to go before the opening date, keyboardist Ralph Schuckett decided he wasn’t healthy enough for the rigors of the road.

Rundgren said he found a message about Shuckett on his phone after flying from Austin to Hawaii (his home is on the island of Kauai).

Given Rundgren’s perfectionism, perhaps readers can imagine how this news struck him.

“At that point, I wanted to walk into the ocean and just keep going,” he said, laughing. “Not look back.”

A Utopia keyboardist has to be as strong a singer as he is a player, so it isn’t surprising to learn that the search for a replacement went nowhere initially.

“After sulking for a while, I decided we couldn’t just go out and hire the usual stand-in,” he said. “There was somebody out there. We just didn’t know who it was.”

As part of an expanded, all-points-bulletin search, Rundgren sent a message to his son, ReBop.

“I asked him, ‘Who is the best keyboard player you know?’ He is zeroed in on a different generation. I knew our shout-out was only likely to yield a lot of dirty, old guys.”

ReBop came back with a name: Israeli-born keyboardist Gil Assayas.

“What Gil had that nobody else did was copious representation on YouTube,” Rundgren said. “In other words, we could evaluate how he played in all sorts of contexts. There was an interview, so we could get some idea about his personality.”

Assayas turned out to be the ideal choice, he said.

“We sent him this stuff and within a week he was already playing as much as two keyboard players had been playing before,” Rundgren said.

Assayas was even able to recreate all the sounds from the analog era on his modern set-up.

“I was kind of stunned us how quickly he absorbed it,” Rundgren said. “Suddenly, it was a sigh of relief.”

Rundgren said it is too early to tell if this reunion will continue beyond this tour.

“There are those elements that always made it hard to get it organized,” he said. “Roger and Ralph had retired from the road. They had other things to do. They actually had employers. So the question always was, ‘How are they going to find a three-month window?’

“Those issues linger,” Rundgren said. “We have to wait until the end and look back to see what we accomplished. We have to see if it was worth the effort of doing it. If so, we’ll probably start talking about doing it again.”

 

Contestants on TV talent shows often tell extraordinary personal stories about the hardships they endured before they got the chance to participate in a TV talent show.

Even in that context, the story that singer-songwriter Mandy Harvey told on the “America’s Got Talent” stage last summer was unusual.

Harvey will perform on May 22 at C2G Music Hall.

In 2006, Harvey was a vocal music major at Colorado State University when the unthinkable happened. She lost her hearing to a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, type 3.

Most people in her position would sink into despair and Harvey admits that she did sink for a while. Most people in her position would try to find a way to accept that they would never sing again.

But Mandy’s father, a minister who had been performing music with her since before she could speak in complete sentences, encouraged her to learn the vocals for a song called “Come Home” by a pop band called OneRepublic. As it turned out, Mandy could still sing in near perfect pitch.

The fact that Mandy’s talents remained undiminished in the wake of total hearing lost stunned Cynthia Vaughn, one of Harvey’s former vocal teachers. Vaughn put Harvey in touch with a jazz pianist named Mark Sloniker and Sloniker subsequently decided to make Harvey his vocalist for weekly gigs at Jay’s Bistro, a jazz-and-tapas place in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Much astonishing success ensued: albums, awards, an autobiography and Simon Cowell’s coveted Gold Buzzer.

Harvey ended up taking fourth place at the end of season 12 of “America’s Got Talent.”

In an email exchange, Harvey told me she keeps tempo on stage by feeling vibrations through the floor. She performs in bare feet to facilitate that synergy.

When practicing, Harvey said she uses “visual tuners” to help govern her pitch. When performing, she depends on her bandmates to an extent that most other vocalists probably don’t depend on theirs.

“There is a lot of communication that is happening on a constant basis,” she said. “Some that you see are head nods and a lot of eye contact. We have solos planned out beforehand and we all look at the musician playing while I am counting each measure. It’s a full team effort!”

Harvey said she “keeps track of the starting note of each song.”

“Several times,” she said, “you will see me look behind me at my bassist and I hum my note and he nods to tell me, ‘Yes,’ or helps me find my place if I am off. It’s a lot of unseen work but it’s a part of my routine.”

Harvey’s bandmates are Alfred Sheppard on piano, Daniel Navarro on bass and Dave Hamar on drums. Will Scecina fulfills the role of “electric guy,” she said, and provides backing vocals.

“As part of my concerts, there is ASL interpretation for every song,” Harvey said, “which I feel brings music more to life and shows the meaning behind the words.”

The Fort Wayne concert will consist mostly of original songs with “a peppering of some of my favorite covers,” she said.

Asked about how her enjoyment of music has changed since she lost her hearing, Harvey answered by typing “hahaha.”

“Music is different is almost every sense of the word,” she said. “I have spent a lot of years learning to love music in the way I experience it now and I’m happy with who I am! Music is much more touch, lyrics, emotion and intensity. I think everyone should kick their shoes off and feel music – pay attention to the vibrations and enjoy the subtleties.”

Harvey described encounters with fans as the greatest joy of touring for her.

“There have been countless memorable experiences and stories people have shared with me about them breaking down barriers on their own journeys,” she said. “A lot of hugs and happy tears! We’re all in this crazy world together and the goal is to lift each other up and encourage!”

A person who has cleared as many significant hurdles as Harvey has really doesn’t have a whole lot to fear going forward and Harvey said she has numerous goals, small and large.

“In the short term, I want to release a lot of beautiful music,” she said, “and I’m working hard for that to be happening very shortly! In the long term I want to make a real difference on inclusion and help change how people view disabilities so they see that we are not broken … just different. I want to work with kids and help encourage the arts in the education system … so many goals!”

I told Harvey that her life story tends to make people who mope readily and get discouraged easily, like me, feel like they really don’t have anything to complain about.

She responded with a lengthy “Hahahahahaha.”

“Well, everyone’s life is theirs,” she said. “Everyone has their own barrier and my goal is just to show that it’s OK to fail. It’s OK to have to start over and reinvent yourself.

“Beauty exists in the pain,” Harvey said, “and it’s such a great opportunity to grow! I love music more now than I ever did before. The reason is simple… I got out of my own way and I am not allowing judgment and fear prevent me from expressing myself.”