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FRIDAY JANUARY 11 2002
Starlight Express hits the buffers
BY JULIAN LEE
Starlight Express, the musical panned by the critics but loved by tourists, grinds to a halt this Saturday, 18 years and 7,406 performances after it first opened. 

It tells the story of a steam engine, Rusty, that falls in love with a carriage, Pearl, and is set to pounding rock music and performed by 24 characters on skates along a quarter-mile track.

The Times was one of the few papers not to damn the show when it opened: "A wonderfully drilled, infectiously energetic, exhilarating company … dazzling," it wrote.

The show's total box office receipts are about £352 million, and 23 million people have been to see it worldwide. It is the second longest-running musical in the West End after Cats, also by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the locomotive musical for his two eldest children, now in their twenties.

In London the show quickly established itself as a tourist mainstay and was updated throughout the years so that neither its music nor its technology would seem dated.

The show's producers believe that children and tourists alone have kept the show going. It was relaunched in 1992, leading one critic to write: "The great thing about Starlight Express is just how wonderful you feel when it stops. The downside is you fear it never will."

Alan Newman, a postman from Kent, is one of Starlight's   fanatical band of followers: he has seen it 750 times, spending an estimated £21,000. He always sits in the same seat: L23 in the stalls.

In 1987 the show went to Broadway, where critics slated it. Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times: "Starlight - the perfect gift for the kid who has everything except parents." It was a commercial success and ran for a further 760 performances.