How many young folks nowadays are familiar with the jargon of trains and railways, “engine”, “coach” and so on? Will a sizeable number share a yearning for the bygone days of steam? I ask because I have an awkward feeling that a substantial proportion of audience members will exit this new production of the 1984 Andrew Lloyd Webber hit without having the faintest idea what the characters were meant to represent.
No matter, say this show’s long-standing legions of fans – the original Trevor Nunn-directed production ran in the West End for 18 years – for this is a musical on roller skates! All the actors, who play personified trains come to life, sing while whizzing about on wheels! What more could you possibly want? A considerable amount more, as it transpires, starting with a coherent story and characters we can care about, no matter whether they are a “first-class observation car” (nope, me neither) or not.
The cavernous Troubadour space in Wembley, all 1,120 sq m of it, has been transformed into a purpose-built “Starlight auditorium”, akin to a high-tech skate park. A huge track swoops around the audience seating in Tim Hatley’s design and there is a ferocious 1.5-metre “Bowl” ramp, down which performers on scooters undertake backflips. Large video screens pump out irredeemably naff 80s-style graphics as the trains gear up to race against each other and the volume is at all times unremittingly loud.
Aside from the admittedly impressive skating high jinx (all performers are required to undergo a rigorous 12-week programme of “skate boot camp”), Starlight Express’s USP is that it continually refreshes songs and references in order to stay relevant. Thus we now have lines such as “Oil is the work of the diesel himself” and a hydrogen-powered train informing us that, “I’m the hero of net zero”.
Yet this is so much window-dressing: this is a story about trains racing and the underdog, a sneered-at steam engine called Rusty (Jeevan Braich), hooking up – in the rolling stock rather than the Tinder sense – with the right partner and coming good, in the process winning the heart of Pearl (Kayna Montecillo), the aforementioned observation car.
Director Luke Sheppard makes a promising stab at grounding the Robocop-on-roller-skates aesthetic as the dream of a young boy, Control (Cristian Buttaci on the night I saw it), who loves to play with his toy engines, but the concept is not sufficiently developed and fizzles out. The songs are a grab-bag of musical styles, with a gospel-inflected closing number, “Light at the End of the Tunnel”, and a witty number about heartbreak, “U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D” (surely the updating required the insertion of the adjective “consciously”?), by a heartbroken dining car who prefers to spell the word out rather than pronounce it.
As to who or what the Starlight Express itself may be, this slick but soulless show left me none the wiser.
Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, booking to 16 February (starlightexpresslondon.com)