Starlight Express Troubadour, Wembley Park, London Rating: Stand well back and hold on tight. This eyeball-scorching, ear-blasting revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s train-racing musical-on-roller-skates is an audio-visual blitzkrieg, the like of which I’ve never seen before. First staged at London’s Apollo Theatre in 1984, this new outing could also be the most exhausting performance I’ve ever witnessed. And yet, you can’t help but salute the ingenuity that’s gone into Tim Hatley’s velodrome-meets-skate-park staging, in this pre-fab industrial unit a stone’s throw from Wembley Stadium.
As for syncing up the high-speed roller skating with the singing, the dancing – and a live band – while we, the audience, crouch in our island pens, the chances of it all going wrong are enormous. It could so easily plunge off the rails into a theatrical train wreck. But, like a big dipper at the fair, that’s all part of the fun. Besides, the costumes are works of such glam-rock excess – including spontaneously inflating angel wings – that at times, it borders on a drag queen parade.
The only problem is that the whole titanic creation teeters on a flimsy, saccharine love story between an obsolete young steam train, Rusty, and a prettily upholstered carriage, Pearl. Yes, the plot is such a pile-up of kitsch, cliché and, pastiche that it’s impossible to take seriously. But…who cares?
Imagine, instead, being stuck inside a supersized Scalextric track, around which the cast, dressed as a futuristic cavalcade, flash by: singing, criss-crossing at high speed, but never quite crashing. Above them, projections of inter-stellar railway lines weave a galactic spaghetti junction and luminous planets descend like gigantic space hoppers. And did I mention the lasers? Or the roll-on oil drums, belching tongues of fire? Or that the whole show is framed as the dream of a small boy?
Were it not for the pounding wall of sound you could almost forget Luke Sheppard’s production is a musical, not just a visit to a hyper-active planetarium. But musical it is, and if the plot feels like sci-fi trainspotting, then Lloyd Webber’s score is an exercise in tune-spotting as over the two-and-a-half hours (including interval), we are assailed by a tsunami of retro-pop parodies. Momma’s Blues, warbled by Rusty’s mother-train (Jade Marvin), mutates into something like a Diana Ross belter. Starlight Sequence, a howling banger of a duet, finds Rusty (Jeevan Braich) responding to Big Momma in a croon that veers between Luther Vandross and Smokey Robinson. Kayna Montecillo, as Pearl, is a petite Ariana Grande, cutely trying to win Rusty’s heart with Whistle At Me.
Amid so much poptastic slush, the comic turn of three carriages, left on the shelf, in U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D (think Tammy Wynette’s D.I.V.O.R.C.E), comes as welcome relief. Then it’s back to race music and finally a Gospel-style hoedown. For a story little more than The Tortoise and the Hare crossed with Thomas the Tank Engine, that’s a lot to carry. Hugely impressive as it may be, it’s more like a trip to the circus than the theatre – and very much one for the school holidays. Tickets are available at starlightexpress.com.
