Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express” is back, four decades after making its West End debut.
Critics may have “sneered” at the show in the past for “lacking sophistication”, and admittedly Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics can be as “bland as an old British Rail sandwich”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. But director Luke Sheppard and his team have conjured a “head-spinning wonderland”, infused with “magic and life-affirming meaning”.
The gleaming revival is “bigger, camper and more preposterously OTT” than the 1984 original, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Yet somehow, this “bizarre juggernaut” “pulls it off”.
It begins, “gently enough”, with a child called Control playing with trains before drifting off to sleep. What follows, said Tim Bano in The Independent, is a “two-and-a-half-hour neon fever dream” where roller-skating trains in “iridescent costumes” zip around the stage. The audience is “rooting” for Rusty (Jeevan Braich) – an old steam engine who competes with rivals Greaseball and Electra in the hopes of impressing observation car Pearl.
The show has been given some “substantial” updates. In the context of the intensifying climate crisis, a new character, Hydra, has been added as “our hero’s helper”, teaming up with Rusty and persuading him to use hydrogen to win the race and be crowned fastest engine in the world.
“Nobody looks even slightly like a train,” said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. But it’s a “tremendous thrill” having the cast “whistle past you at high velocity” and “frankly it’s a lot of fun”. While it is “technically dazzling”, I couldn’t help but wonder why Sheppard’s production couldn’t have “a better story, characters to actually care about, or basic internal coherence”.
The “wafer-thin” characters leave you longing for more personality, agreed David Benedict in Variety, and the new songs “add little”. One of the high points, though, is Howard Hudson’s skilful lighting which “ignites and punctuates everything”: lasers, pulsing lights and “intense washes of turquoise and purple” give the show a thrumming energy.
This works in tandem with the “amazing” video design which transports you “inside a feverish child’s mind”, added Bano in The Independent. “To be frank, it often sounds like a child has written the music and lyrics too”. It certainly isn’t Lloyd Webber’s finest score. But ultimately it doesn’t really matter: more “spectacle than sense”, “Starlight Express” is an “extraordinary creative onslaught” designed to “delight your inner child – which it really does”.
Starlight Express is at Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, London, until June 2025.