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Where the trains were always on time
BY IAN JOHNS
As Starlight Express finally hits the buffers, our critic salutes the passing of a tourist London institution
After an 18-year run, the rollerskating musical Starlight Express headed into the sidings for the last time at London’s Apollo Victoria on Saturday. It was a night in which the £5 souvenir programmes were free, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Trevor Nunn and choreographer Arlene Phillips got to thank everyone who had ever worked on the show, current and former cast members made numerous laps of honour, and we could all go home with a Starlight Express mug. Stephen Byers, apparently, couldn’t make it — spending an evening in which all the trains run on time was probably not his idea of fun.

Starlight Express has become the second-longest running musical in West End history — beaten only by Lloyd Webber’s own Cats — and features some awesome numbers, but mainly of the non-musical kind. The £2.25 million production opened in March 1984. It was the equivalent of a Hollywood event movie, a big-is-beautiful spectacle that would clock up 7,406 shows, be seen by more than eight million people, and take more than £140 million in ticket sales.

This, if you need reminding, is the musical about a variety of trains (ie, fresh-faced, Lycra-clad rollerskaters) coming together for an international race (cue the cast hurtling past the audience in initially thrilling but subsequently repetitive fashion). There’s also a soppy romance, in which plucky steam train Rusty has to beat the massed forces of electricity and diesel so he can couple with observation car Pearl.

Like the characters and plot, the over-amplified songs are forgettable, with Richard Stilgoe’s often inane lyrics adding to their synthetic feel. Yet Lloyd Webber’s something-for-everyone score, which ranges from pop and blues to country and gospel, the triumph-over-adversity story, and bravura pyrotechnics proved to be an unbeatable tourist-friendly combination.

Lloyd Webber told us that he’d written the show for his now twentysomething children and to attract a young audience to the theatre, which perhaps explains its almost child-like simplicity. But, like Cirque du Soleil, you can admire the production values and precision of the cast without being touched by a thing. Saturday’s audience, including a woman in red Lycra, white breastplate and pink fright wig (“I’m dressed as Joule, the dynamite truck!”) and the 18-year-old son of a now deceased original investor in the show, loved every minute.

Even though the production has been “freshened up” over the years, with less body-popping and nods to hip hop and rap, it showed its age on Saturday. It’s a paean to steam with aerobics-style choreography. Even Electra, “engine of the future”, with his scarlet-streaked hair and hint of gender-bending seems more apt for Boy George’s new 1980s-set musical Taboo.

Although Lloyd Webber plans to renationalise Starlight Express with a UK tour, he now seems in search of a new audience as he moves away from applaud-the-scenery theatre. He will soon see if he’s found it when his Bollywood-inspired musical Bombay Dreams opens at the Apollo Victoria in May.