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W hat bald-faced audacity led Andrew Lloyd Webber to conceive a show featuring the lives – and loves – of train carriages that sing their way through a nocturnal track-race while on roller-skates? Is Starlight Express the most outlandish musical ever to grace the stage? It certainly seems so as it rumbles back from its bay after four decades in a bigger, camper and more preposterously OTT revival than its 1984 original, though the most confounding question is how this bizarre juggernaut of a show pulls it off in spite of it all. If it divided audiences back then, becoming cult viewing for some, rusty machinery for others, this production will most likely do the same. Several degrees weirder than Cats, tailor-made for the Troubadour’s massive auditorium, it erupts like a Vesuvius of light, sound, projection and dry ice under the direction of Luke Sheppard.

There is no getting away from the immersive delirium, with a welter of glitter-balls in the foyer outside (a warning to those who suffer from motion sickness: one of my young companions had to reluctantly leave the show after Act One). There are big stadium optics (lighting by Howard Hudson, video by Andrzej Goulding), thumping bass (sound by Gareth Owen), a hurricane of speed and motion (Ashley Nottingham is choreographer and Arlene Phillips , who was involved in the original, is creative dramaturg) and outre costumes (by Gabriella Slade), with retro-futuristic David Bowie lightning strikes painted across faces. Scoot.



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