Liverpool Arts: THEATRE REVIEW: Starlight Express, Liverpool Empire

IT WAS the roller skates that gave Starlight Express the wow factor when it first opened in the West End back in the 80s – musical theatre performers transformed into daredevil trains by swapping their dance shoes for wheels.

And despite that no longer seeming such a radical concept nearly three decades on, it’s the roller skates that keep the show popular today.

Which is just as well because the plot won’t do it – as love stories go it’s hardly Gone With the Wind, although the heroine is just as selfish as Scarlett O’Hara, and the hero’s triumph over adversity is not that great a victory when it’s only his own stubbonness that’s holding him back.

Perhaps it’s hard for steam engine Rusty to rally his spirits for a race against more modern rolling stock simply to impress his girl after she’s dumped him for a gyrating locomotive in a red, white and blue mohican.

Actually, the two leads played their parts well – Kristofer Harding as the dishevelled dreamer and Amanda Coutts as high-maintenance first class coach Pearl – the characters are just not all that endearing.

Yet there’s something enduringly charming about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, even in its updated form which replaces some of the original music with bland, modern, instantly forgettable pop. Many of those original numbers that survived the cull work as well today as ever – among them the rock ’n’ roll song Pumping Iron, the country and western pastiche U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D. and the rhythmical Freight.

The staging is exciting enough – movable ramps, pyrotechnics and snazzy lighting creating the imaginary world of a little boy’s dreams where toy trains compete in break-neck races. A series of fun 3D films show the different heats, with competitors tumbling off bridges or falling victim to sabotage in Wacky Races fashion.

And Arlene Phillips’s choreography is energetic and playful, although performances in the opening few numbers felt a bit mechanically lacklustre.

It tightened up as soon as Electra arrived on stage however – flying in dramatically on a wire. Mykal Rand as the “engine of the future” blew the rest of the cast off the stage – his magnetic performance showing no sign of fatigue despite having appeared in Starlight Express regularly since 1987.