mspt@goldfishpublishers.com
Reviewed 1/6/04
According to a legend, perhaps apocryphal, gazillionaire tunesmith Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to write a show for his ten year-old son, who was fascinated with trains. The result of Webber’s earnest wish to entertain a child is the train wreck known as Starlight Express. This overblown entertainment is proof that The Really Useful Company can create something from nothing, and make a bundle while doing it. In 1984, London’s Apollo Theatre Victoria was turned into a gigantic multi-level roller rink to allow the actors to portray trains that are fighting for the honor of being the fastest. Hidden beneath the hype of roller-choreography, an enormous set, ear-splitting sound, and seizure-inducing lights, Webber’s bland music and Richard Stilgoe’s embarrassingly stilted lyrics escaped notice. Despite a major critical drubbing, the show had a respectable Broadway run of 761 performances. The original ‘89 tour tried to recreate as much of the largeness as possible, and a glitzy version recently mounted in Las Vegas is drawing crowds. However, the current tour that has stumbled into Tempe’s Gammage Auditorium tries to pull off this show on the cheap, and despite the talented, acrobatic group of youngsters propping up this venture, the cut corners draw attention to the fact that this is a script only a ten year-old could truly enjoy.
Don’t get me wrong, this production does have its share
of entertainment value. It lacks much of the live roller-skating of the original,
thanks to
the cheesy cop-out of a corny video (produced by Alexandra Ferguson,
directed by Julian Napier) and enhanced by 3-D “safety
goggles” generously
handed out to the audience to recreate the three races, but every performer
on the stage sells the show with the kind of earnestness most often found on
Sesame Street. This is the level of enjoyment I’m speaking of here: In
one cute song in the second act, Dinah the Diner Car (an appealing Katie
O’Toole)
mourns the loss of her diesel locomotive beau Greaseball (a cocky and self-assured
Drue Williams) by crooning “U-N-C-O-U-P-L-E-D” with
her friends Smoking Car Ashley and Buffy the Snack Car. Little steam train
that could Rusty
(a chipper and strong-voiced Franklyn Warfield) and his mentor,
aging steam train Poppa (a deep-voiced and dominating Dennis LeGree)
spend a lot of time singing about what might be if they could beat Greaseball
and the overbearing
AC/DC Electric Train Electra (a sneeringly funny Dustin Dubreuil).
No one’s
going to win a Pulitzer here. It was nominated for the 1987 Best Musical Tony®,
but then again, so was Charles Strouse and Stephen
Schwartz’ Rags, which
ran a whopping four performances, proving the nod was more about the dearth
of Broadway musicals in the late 80s than the power of this piece.
Arlene
Phillips’ whiz-bang direction and choreography move the
evening along briskly, and Mark Norfolk’s over-amplified
sound mercifully blocks out a lot of the banal lyrics, though this may
regrettably be fixed further
in the run as operators manipulate the levels. Surprisingly, spectacle is generally
missing from John Napier’s greatly scaled-down set,
but is still basically captured by his flashy costumes and Rick Belzer’s heavy-fog-and-specials
lighting. As opposed to Theatre League’s recent Miss
Saigon, which surprisingly
soared when freed from its original spectacle, this energetically skates onto
dangerously thin ice.
At the end, the opening night audience was cajoled into giving the show a hesitant standing “O.” Personally, I’ve never seen so much energy released with so little to work with, and if that’s a reason to stand, then this evening got what it deserved.
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