![]() The moment that they saw a steam engine, it was in fact a rather dark, black steam engine, but a beautiful, beautiful thing, I mean, when I saw their faces I thought there has to be something that's got to be for children and about railway trains. ![]() Andrew, where did the extraordinary idea for Starlight Express come from?ĪLW: I thought of the idea of doing a musical about trains years and years ago, but never thought I could really organize it, and then I was on a railroad in America about two years ago, with my kids, Imogen and Nicholas. And unless your name is Andrew Lloyd Webber. Now if you're a composer of musicals and you announce that your next project will feature a group of actors, dancers and singers on roller-skates, all of them playing locomotives, carriages or box cars, you might expect to be not so much "rolling stock" as a laughing stock.That is of course, unless your track record includes Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Song & Dance and Cats. Its sung by Ray Shell who is playing the part of Rusty, a steam engine. TD: That's the title song from the show, and now the double album, Starlight Express. Interview promoting Starlight Express and the release of the OLC Album in 1984 gargantuan train set, death-defying industrial iron-girdered swing bridge that could swivel through 360 degrees, tilt and rise up and down all at the same time, was a far cry from the Rev Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine.’ – Chapter 33: Miss Sarah Brightman.It was later, when the suits shoehorned it into conventional theatres that Starlight spun off the rails, or at least some of the productions did. I could have fun writing out and out pop for a show that would sit way outside the mainstream theatre box. Our show could reach audiences for whom theatre was a no-go zone not just the Joseph children’s audience but street kids who might relate to Starlight and then graze on more grown-up fodder. Consequently Arlene put together a group that would celebrate diversity today let alone in 1983…Most of our cast wouldn’t have known what the inside of a theatre looked like. If we thought it hard to find performers who could sing, dance and act for Cats, adding roller skates to the mix took casting to uncharted recesses.Now it was growing like Topsy and I needed an antidote… Come New Year 1984, I decided to have a stab at setting music to that most theatrical of texts, the Latin Requiem Mass. 'Although I was doing my best for Starlight, I never intended it to be anything other than a left-field fun project.I guess it was inevitable that after the success of Cats people would see in Starlight something different and rather bigger than I did.' – Chapter 32: The Most Obnoxious Form of ‘Music’ Ever Invented Starlight Express at Sydmonton was a small, warm-hearted entertainment… Everyone thought Starlight Express was well meaning, if schoolboy fun… the festival guest list was becoming a theatre industry shindig, so there was lots of chatter about Starlight’s fate.Review - Fiona Sturges, 28th February 2018 And even though 'Starlight' is not and never will be, as it turned out, one of my favourite shows, it's interesting to see how many letters we get saying, 'I went to see the Requiem or I saw "Evita" on tour because my kids so liked "Starlight Express." 'Īndrew Lloyd Webber published a memoir, "Unmasked", in February 2018, which has proven a useful source of information about the development of the show, and a glimpse into the composer's opinions and thoughts. ![]() "Trevor (Nunn) felt that it had a value in bringing audiences to the theatre who normally don't go to it. It got taken - in hindsight, against my better judgement - into something that it really was not," Lloyd Webber said, lamenting the way the show grew into a major extravaganza. We did it as that in the first performances. " 'Starlight' was supposed to be a little animated cartoon about Cinderella, in which the steam train would be Cinderella and the diesel and the electric were to be the ugly stepsisters and the midnight special was the fairy godmother. "Let's say it's my least favourite show." That's valid," composer Andrew Lloyd Webber told an interviewer in London recently. "People have said that Starlight Express was a mistake. 5 "The New Starlight Express" (London October 1992).
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