Starlight Express Cast
How's this for an outrageously unlikely musical plot: a Lego-style, Thomas the Tank Engine gathering for a world championship race to see what's best in the railway engine technology stakes? They come from all over the world and they fall into three categories: the old-fashioned traditional steam, the contemporary, current world champion diesel, and the clean, flashy way-ahead electric train.

We all know the famous dream sequences in musicals. Starlight Express is a whole dream sequence from start to finish, for it's the working out of an unseen small boy's dream. So it's all there just as in the best dreams: a glorious jumble of intense colours, styles, characters from different times, the good and the not so good, high excitement shot through with frissons of fear, magical mixes of music and songs, daredevil tricks and Gene Rodenberry-style TV, depth of space technology coming at you.

The trains - engines, tenders and carriages - are all played by young adults very cleverly-costumed with every detail describing the character and the action is set against a huge skateboarding stage backed by banks and banks of lights and which extends out into the stalls. And - everybody's on ROLLER SKATES! Hush! There's more. 3D glasses, handed out on entry, are used (when prompted) to intensify the excitement, personal involvement and heightened immediacy as well as sending that thrill of fear and horror, just as in the scariest nightmares.

It's all huge fun, a terrific hotch-potch of visual and aural cameos arriving and moving on at high speed, too fast and furious to take it all in. Child-like excitement fizzes all around, in the the audience as well as the cast. It was great to see the grown-ups just as excited (and vocal) as the many children who were there.

James Gillan who plays Rusty, the young steam engine, has exactly the right face and personality to portray the innately good and ever-helpful, optimistic steam engine with no real hope of fame or success. He pulls everyone's strings of sympathy and wishful thinking and brings bright flashes of a happy-go-lucky love of life to the role.

The All-American football, fast-living, seemingly at the top of his fame, flashy hero Greaseball (played by Tom Kanavan) is the shoe-in favourite to win the title again. Kanavan, bearing more than a passing resemblance to James Dean in a hippy headband, reveals the shadier side of the secretly-unsure Greaseball.

The third contender in the final race, Electra, is the very essence of the cusp of the 1960's 'white heat of space age technology' segueing into the 1970's 'Third wave' of squeaky clean, glossy Mohawk hairstyle, revolutionary future.

How it all works out is fun all the way, with loads of audience involvement through the 3D sequences, the whole lot tipping into involuntary clapping, appreciative yelling and whistling, and uninhibited appreciation of the stars at closer than normal intimacy.

Because this show played for some 18 years at London's Apollo Victoria, the specially-built staging allowed for high speed roller races wrapping around the theatre's audience. But the other UK theatres can't do that. So the thrills of the stars' speed has been turned into the technological thrills of the 3D sequences, brilliantly realised by John Napier's designs and the wizardry of Julian Napier's 3D filming.

Another compensation is the very impressive skills of the skateboarder Matt King who had the whole audience gasping at the Olympic-style stunts. As the show wound to its celebratory finale, this was a real bonus.

All in all, this fast-and-furious show threw an enormous amount at us, all too much to take in at one go. And I haven't even talked about the songs and the music. Memorable numbers: Pumping iron, Poppa's blues, U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D., One rock'n'roll too many, Only he and - of course - Starlight Express itself, especially in the second half's Starlight sequence where Rusty reveals what it's really all about.

There's a fourth dimension here. That's a superb cast who've all had to do all the high energy musicals' things - plus - do them all on roller skates. You try singing and skating at the same time. Not at all easy! Go and see it. You won't regret it!

© Pat Napier. 31 March 2005 Published on www.edinburghguide.com

Run: 30 March - 7 May 2005