Quite possibly the most aggressively ‘80s artefact in existence, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ is a musical about anthropomorphic roller skating trains that often feels like being forced to watch ten consecutive episodes of some trashy Saturday morning action cartoon. It’s loud. It’s dumb. It barely has characters in any meaningful sense. Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics are kind of anti-Sondheim: it’s a show that makes your brain contract with every second that passes.
And yet to complain ‘Starlight Express’ isn’t very clever is like complaining tigers aren’t very good at accountancy. It exists as pure spectacle, and where the original production ran out of steam on the West End way back in 2002 (after a near 18 year stint), this revival from ‘& Juliet’ man Luke Sheppard supercharges it.
Staged at what would appear to be enormous expense, the nouveau ‘Starlight Express’ has given Wembley’s hi-tech but hitherto under-utilised Troubadour Wembley Park a real sense of purpose. The production is billed as ‘immersive’, and while I’d argue that’s a stretch, the reconfigured auditorium - designed by Tim Hatley - is extremely cool, with the audience divided into little seating areas that the roller skating actors whoosh around at roughly head height.
Oh yeah, roller skating. Ultimately ‘Starlight Express’ is inseparable from its original conceit, which is that the actors playing the trains skate around the venue. Maybe one day after it’s fallen out of copyright somebody will stage a version with no skating. But for the foreseeable, skating is the inarguable vision of Webber and choreographer Arlene Philips.
And frankly it’s a lot of fun. In truly spectacular costumes from Gabriella Slade, the cast is kind of dressed like Warhammer 40K Space Marines given a Drag Race makeover. Nobody looks even slightly like a train. But it is a tremendous thrill to have these prodigies whistle past you at high velocity. Obviously it’s a silly idea for a show.. But a lot of very skilled things are silly if you think about them too much. Skating around an amphitheatre while singing, acting and wearing what looks like about half a tonne of costume is frankly incredible (shout out to skate coordinator Luke Zammit). And I haven’t even got on to how sensational everybody’s hair looks (respect to wig designer Campbell Young).
It’s not a deep show. The songs are performed very loud, a weirdly eclectic but generally pop-orientated grab bag of varying quality, but on the whole more bombastic than memorable. There is pyro. The plot is simultaneously easy to follow and incomprehensible: a boy is playing racing games with his trains, so this is presumably all just his game.
The nominal hero-slash-train-slash-rollerdude is Jeevan Beech’s Rusty, a sensitive steam engine who has been written off and ridiculed by his rivals Greaseball (Al Knott) and Electra (Tom Pigram). There is a lot of weird politics about which train has which carriage and enormous amounts of debate about secondary power sources. In theory Starlight Express is a show pushing a rather eco-unfriendly pro steam train agenda, but it deliriously refuses to make that much sense (it is based on a small child’s logic) and Rusty ends up joining with Jaydon Vijn’s hydrogen powered Hydra. ‘I’m a net zero hero’ he sings in one of the more obviously updated lines. Together they form some sort of carbon neural supertrain, which doesn’t make sense but doesn’t really have to.
‘Starlight Express’ is a lot of fun and has no aspirations to be anything other than exactly what it is. It is technically dazzling. It is a rare musical that’s perfect for rowdy tweens. There is truly nothing else like it - you simply cannot point to another musical about roller skating trains and say ‘I prefer that one’.
And yet I can’t help but feel pretty icky about giving one of the most successful pieces of commercial art of all time a pat on the head and a pass on grounds of ‘you do you babe’. Why not have a better story, or characters to actually care about, or basic internal coherence? Thrilling as Sheppard’s production is, it doesn’t make any interrogation at all of the source material or the basic conceit of the show - the idea appears to have solely been ‘the same as before, but flashier’. Reading between the lines, I think Webber takes a lot of personal interest in this show, having tinkered with it relentlessly over the years, and I wonder how much latitude Sheppard really had. But it’s hard not to think wistfully of last year’s Jamie Lloyd revival of Webber’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’, which elevated a ho-hum musical into a work of genius through an audacious directorial vision that far transcended the original production. ‘Starlight Express’ is basically a gimmick - a glorious, thrilling gimmick. But I truly believe it could be more than that.
