circleWas it the sheer audacity that led Andrew Lloyd Webber to dream up a show about the lives and loves of a train carriage that sings as it races along a nighttime track on roller skates? Is Starlight Express the most outlandish musical ever put on stage?
Certainly, its 40-year revival seems like an even bigger, flashier, more radical revival than the 1984 original, but what’s most puzzling is how this strange, behemoth show manages to succeed in spite of itself.
The film was likely to polarise audiences in its time, becoming a cult classic for some and a boring machine for others. Several notches stranger than Cats and tailored for the Troubadour’s enormous auditorium, it erupted like a Vesuvius of light, sound, projections and dry ice under Luke Shepherd’s direction.
The outer lobby is littered with glittering balls, making it impossible to escape the immersive excitement (warning for those who suffer from motion sickness: one of my young companions reluctantly had to leave the show after the first act).
There’s giant stadium lighting (lighting by Howard Hudson, video by Andrzej Goulding), deep bass (sound by Gareth Owen), a whirlwind of speed and movement (choreography by Ashley Nottingham, with original author Arlene Phillips as creative dramaturge) and outlandish costumes (designed by Gabriela Slade), with retro-futuristic David Bowie lightning bolts painted on their faces.
The scooters do somersaults as the roller-skating cast sings and slaloms onto the stage (designed by Tim Hatley), then moves around a circuit that wraps around the auditorium.
From the opening scene where a young boy is tucked in bed, we are transported to his dream world and a psychedelic train race. It’s all disjointed, the show tries to cram too much of everything in – there’s no need for the incessant blaring background music that sounds like a Friday night game show – and a vague sense of dread, as if the boy will never wake up from a Dorothy-like fever dream, trapped forever in Oz tied to a train.
A variety of trains and their components, from electric to hydrogen In addition to the diesel engines and old-fashioned steam locomotives, the production features eight more characters, each as detailed as the next, though they mostly just parade around rather than tell a story, except for Hydra (Jaedon Vine), who performs a new number, “Hydrogen,” a clever duet between Hydra and Rusty.
Some of the characters look as if they’ve been transported from the Enterprise, particularly the silver-winged, campy android Elektra (Tom Pigram, looking like something out of Drag Race).
Slowly, all too slowly, a love story develops between Pearl (Keina Montecillo) and Rusty (Jeevan Brach) that’s as close to a locomotive encounter as you’ll get. Brach has a truly extraordinary voice, and there’s wonderful, tender chemistry between Rusty and Pearl, but the force of their story feels frustratingly sidelined.
Repeated races make the physics faster but ironically slower-paced and overall the story lacking, but there’s charm, wit (including a quip about the railroad network announcing the presence of fallen leaves on the tracks) and audacity.
Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics are silly but fun (“Freight is great,” sings one train; “I’m a net-zero hero,” sings another, the latter a testament to the show’s update to reflect our world). The songs are fantastic, complete with train sounds and whooshes, and span genres from glam rock to blues to hip hop to country to musical ballads. The songs are generally superbly sung, with some great feats of athleticism from the cast.
Pearl and Rusty’s duet “Whistle At Me” sings of the sweet impulses of high school love, AC/DC adds excitement to the races, and “Momma’s Blues” sung by Mom (Jade Marvin) is another highlight.
“Sublime or absurd?” I asked my remaining young companion at the end of the first day. She answered that it was both, a verdict with which I entirely agree.
