What bald-faced audacity led Andrew Lloyd Webber to conceive a show featuring the lives – and loves – of train carriages that sing their way through a nocturnal track-race while on roller-skates? Is Starlight Express the most outlandish musical ever to grace the stage?
It certainly seems so as it rumbles back from its bay after four decades in a bigger, camper and more preposterously OTT revival than its 1984 original, though the most confounding question is how this bizarre juggernaut of a show pulls it off in spite of it all.
If it divided audiences back then, becoming cult viewing for some, rusty machinery for others, this production will most likely do the same. Several degrees weirder than Cats, tailor-made for the Troubadour’s massive auditorium, it erupts like a Vesuvius of light, sound, projection and dry ice under the direction of Luke Sheppard.
There is no getting away from the immersive delirium, with a welter of glitter-balls in the foyer outside (a warning to those who suffer from motion sickness: one of my young companions had to reluctantly leave the show after Act One).
There are big stadium optics (lighting by Howard Hudson, video by Andrzej Goulding), thumping bass (sound by Gareth Owen), a hurricane of speed and motion (Ashley Nottingham is choreographer and Arlene Phillips, who was involved in the original, is creative dramaturg) and outre costumes (by Gabriella Slade), with retro-futuristic David Bowie lightning strikes painted across faces.
Scooters do flips while the roller-skating cast sing and slalom on to the stage (designed by Tim Hatley), and then on to the circuit woven around the auditorium itself.
An opening scene, of a boy being tucked into his bed, leads us into his dream-world, and the psychedelic train race. None of it quite coheres and the show throws too much of everything in. It does not need the constantly pumping background music that makes it seem like a Friday night gameshow at times. And the boy never wakes up from his Dorothy-like fever dream, which gives a distantly scary sense that he is permanently stuck in this train-bound Oz.
The various trains and their parts, from electric to hydrogen as well as diesel and good old-fashioned steam, bring an additional eight characters to this production, each more elaborately created than the next, but they merely parade more than tell a story, although Hydra (Jaydon Vijn) does bring a new number, Hydrogen, a clever duet between Hydra and Rusty.
Some characters look as if they have been beamed in from the Starship Enterprise, especially the silver-winged camp android-like Electra (Tom Pigram, straight out of Drag Race).
Slowly – too slowly – a love story emerges between Pearl (Kayna Montecillo) and Rusty (Jeevan Braich), which is the closest thing to a locomotive meet-cute. Braich has a truly extraordinary voice, and there is great tender chemistry between Rusty and Pearl, but the power of their story feels frustratingly side-lined.
Repeated races bring physical speed but ironically slow the pace and there is not enough story as a whole. But there is charm, wit (including digs at the railway network with announcements of leaves on the track), and chutzpah.
Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics are ridiculous yet enjoyable (“freight is great”, sings one train, “I’m the hero of net zero,” sings another, the latter proof that the show has been updated to reflect our world) and the songs are superb, carrying the chug or hiss of trains and crossing genres from glam-rock to blues to hip-hop, country and musical ballad. They are masterfully sung all round, alongside the athletic feats of the cast.
Whistle At Me, a duet by Pearl and Rusty has the sugar rush of a high-school crush while AC/DC carries all the excitement of the race and Momma’s Blues is another highlight, sung by Momma (Jade Marvin).
“Sublime or ridiculous?” I ask my remaining young companion at the end of opening night. Both, she says. A verdict with which I wholly concur.
• Starlight Express is at Troubadour Wembley Park theatre, London, until 16 February.
