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Loafer's guide

Starlight Express

Observer

Sunday January 6, 2002

The venerable, perennial Lloyd Webber musical featuring amazons on roller skates, pretending to be singing trains?

That's overstating the case a little.

Yes, 'venerable' was probably a bit full-on

Actually, it's more the 'perennial' bit. Starlight is finally heading for the Bide-A-Wee Home for Retired Rolling Stock. After 18 years and 7,406 performances at London's Apollo Victoria Theatre, to the ovations of eight million awestruck punters (making it the second longest-running musical in West End history), its curtain call comes next Saturday. The choo-choos are being terminated - with extreme prejudice.

Another victim of Railtrack's inglorious ineptitude?

It's certainly being re-nationalised - it's heading off on a UK tour. But some green-eyed sneerers might submit that what did for it was the fact that no one can remember, much less hum, a single song from the enterprise, apart from maybe a snatch of the one that the bloke from Shalimar did - you know, him with the funny hair who was really good at doing that ooh-I'm-trapped-in-a-cardboard-box-type break dancing in the mid-80s - about being AC/DC, presumably in an open-gauge kind of way.

And does this free up some valuable West End space for something genuinely cutting-edge? A German Expressionist-style opera based on the musings of Noam Chomsky? An all-female production of Bouncers ?

Well, the next crowd-puller at the theatre, opening this summer, is Bombay Dreams, a thorough immersion in the vibrant, not to say unfeasibly garish, world of Bollywood and all its attendant laughter, tears, trilling, twirling and navel-wobbling.

All right! A chance for some shoestring National Theatre of Bangalore-type touring company to show the old farts of the West End and their dreary franchises how it's done!

Erm, actually, it's the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.