In 1974, Andrew Lloyd Webber began working on songs for an animated TV series based on the Thomas the Tank Engine children’s books. It didn’t pan out, but the idea of singing, anthropomorphic trains would lay the foundations – or should that be the railway tracks? – for the 1984 debut of Starlight Express, the bonkers musical extravaganza in which actors don roller skates to whizz past the audience in a theatre refitted with a race track. Decked out in Eighties-meets-steampunk outfits, they play all-singing, all-dancing trains competing to be crowned the fastest engine in the world.
It’s enough to make its predecessor Cats look sensible and understated. Starlight Express has certainly been the butt of many jokes about the fever dream excesses of Eighties musical theatre – but it’s also a show that inspires diehard devotion (both semi-ironic and entirely sincere). During its first 17-year stint in the West End, it was seen by more than 8 million people and earned £140m at the box office. It has run since 1988 in the purpose-built Starlighthalle in Bochum, Germany, a venue that has held the Guinness World Record for most visitors to a musical in a single theatre since 2010. And, this month, Starlight Express is making an extravagant return to London, pulling into the Wembley Park Theatre and transforming this cavernous former television studio with ramps, runways and pyrotechnics.
