Mickey Jo (0:00)

Woohoo. Starlight Express. Starlight Express. Starlight Express. Starlight Express. Starlight Express. Starlight Express. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theater themed YouTube channel. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theater. And if I seem excited this morning, it's because we have finally had the news drop. Starlight Express, the musical all about trains is coming back to London. Now this rumor has been rolling around for a little while now. Yes, that is a train pun. Yes. There will be many more in today. Today's video. I feel like I've mentioned this in previous videos talking about Andrew Lloyd Webber shows, the fact that Starlight Express was making its way back to London and finally it's been announced it's going to be happening in June of 2024 at the Troubadour Wembley park in Wembley. Obviously this is the theatre where newsies was. It's this big warehouse of a venue that gives them the opportunity to do something really exciting akin to the production that's currently running in Bochum, Germany and has been for years. Akin to the production that originally happened at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London, where they had this skating track going around the audience up to the dress circle. But this is also going to be an all new production with a largely new creative team. We learned a lot in this press release this morning that I got sent. I am going to read it to you and we're going to talk about everything we know already about the coming Starlight Express revival. And for those of you who don't know the show, I'm going to explain a little bit about what it is and why I'm actually super hyped for this. So if you enjoyed today's video, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel for more theatre news. I make lots of reviews of the shows that I get invited to see both in the West End and on Broadway and lots more stagey content. Make sure you subscribe. But for now, let's talk about Starlight Express coming back to London. So if you have no idea about this whatsoever. Starlight Express was a 1984 British musical written by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgo, who wrote the lyrics for Lloyd Webber's music. I should note already at this point that this show, like many Lloyd Webber shows, has undergone a significant amount of development and many changes over the years. Not significant changes, but little cosmetic stuff like with a lot of his shows. And so there are many additional lyricists credited. Don Black has written additional lyrics, Yazbek, David Yazbeck has written additional lyrics as well as Lauren Aquilina and Nic Kohler. Angela Webber's son Alastair has also written additional music for the show. I think he wrote one new song for for the production in Germany. That production opened in 1988 and is still running today, and is where all of these changes have been implemented over the years, some very recently that I'll talk about in just a minute. But in the West End it initially ran at the Apollo Victoria Theatre where Wicked is now playing. And the whole conceit of this show, if you know nothing about it, is that it is about trains. These actors are playing trains and carriages and dining cars, even though they look largely like people who are costumed in a sort of a steampunky, futuristic way. But to give them the sense of being trains, the whole show is always performed on roller skates, except when it was briefly performed on ice Fun Sidebar Fact I was once planning to audition for an amateur production of Starlight Express. Yes, that's been a thing and no, it probably shouldn't be. And in the weeks leading up to the auditions, on two separate occasions, I broke bones trying to learn how to roller skate. I ended up being a singing offstage train. But this is the show where people play trains and they are competitive trains and angry trains and trains of different nationalities. And there are sexy trains and there are train love trash, if you can believe such a thing. There are queer coded trains in this. It's all going on. So that first production at the Apollo Victoria brought a fair amount of spectacle and was really pioneering for its time. And like I mentioned at the beginning, there was this track where the skaters could skate up to the dress circle and then it went to Broadway. They had this bridge set piece. If you want a recount of some of the show's early disasters, there is a fantastic documentary about it over on my friend Brendan's channel. Wait in the wings and you can go and find out about the history of Starlight Express in the years since it has toured the UK a couple of times in different formats, obviously going to different venues. They couldn't like purpose build different tracks in the theaters and arenas that they visited. So they did a lot of things with screens that was cool and a great use of technology, but not quite the same. So what's so exciting about it? Coming back to London in this set designated venue rather than coming back as a tour means we're going to get something very, very special. So I'm going to briefly explain the plot of this Musical to you. Now, this is another one where people say the plot is strange or confusing. I think it's one of the clearest plots in the world. But I think the same thing about Cats. So if you haven't seen my video where I drink a bottle of wine and try and explain the plot of Cats while dressed as a cat, feel free to go and educate yourselves. But if anyone wants a video where I try and dress as a train from Starlight Express and explain the plot of Starlight Express, I will happily do so. Also, if it sounds like I've been drinking now because I'm slurring my words, it's just because I'm so excited about this train musical, I need to calm down. This is not professional. It's just. It's just that nobody can do it like a steam train, you guys. So Starlight Express, the show that gave us such lyrical masterpieces as Freight Is Great and Gravel's Got the Right to Travel, a lyric I unironically love, actually is set within the world of a child who is playing with his train set, and that justifies all of the madness therein. Like Cats is a bit of a crazy concept, I will admit to that, even though I have a fondness for the show. But Starnet Express, think of it as Toy Story, but for trains. And like I mentioned before, we have international trains of different designated races. We have girl trains and boy trains. We have a queer coded train. We have antagonist trains. We have obnoxious, macho trains. One of the trains is a Southern belle for some reason, and everything is building up to this big race. Kind of like how in Cats there's this big cat competition about who gets to die. In Starlight Express, there's going to be this big race happening towards the end of the show, and you've got Greaseball, the macho diesel train. And then Elektra arrives, who's this newfangled electric train. And everyone's like, oh, new technology. And Greaseball's not happy about it. Meanwhile, we have the underdog, Rusty. No one's taking him seriously. He's an old, rusty steam train. But he is our protagonist. He is the guy that we're rooting for in all of this. He is in love with Pearl, who is one of the coaches. She's the first class coach, and she's friends with the other coaches who have varied from production to production. We always get Dinah, the dining car. She's the main love interest of Greaseball, but then she goes to Elektra. Everyone goes very Back and forth in this show. Some of the other coaches we've had over the years are Duvet, the sleeping car. We've had Buffy, the buffet car. We've had Ashley, the smoking car. Now, she. She was cut some time ago for obvious reasons. And the song that the four of them has also been adapted several times over the years. There was this original version called A Lotta Locomotion. Lotta Locomotion. That's what we need now. That was changed in the early 2000s to give it more of a kind of current Girls Aloud type of a pop sound. And it became a whole lot of Locomotion. A whole lot of locomotion. Hold on, Mo o tion. Now, I'm trying to get this right, because that melody was changed once. It got reused for Tell Me On a Sunday, or maybe Tell Me on a Sunday came first. In any case, both of them then got stolen for the Beauty Underneath. I only know about this because someone told me in a comment recently. But the Beauty Underneath being the rock and roll song in Love Never Dies. So they changed a whole lot of Locomotion to be A Whole Lot of Locomotion or Mo o tion. Something. Something different anyway. Something different from that previous melody. But it's irrelevant now because the song has changed again and it's become I've got Me or I Am Me. Ich bin ich in German. And I know I'm getting distracted from the main focus of today's video, which is the show coming back, but when it does come back, it's gonna be with this new song. And it's just so funny to me that they've taken what used to be this Aren't we such sexy trains song and turned it into a feminist anthem. They're moving with the times. This tells us that Starlight Express is aware of the world around it, and they're trying to update the show. Because this was probably one of the more egregious numbers in the show with the way it represented the female trains. This song goes some of the way to address the fact that all of the female cast members in the show are the coaches being tethered and driven around by the male locomotives, if I'm using those words correctly. I don't know things about trains, you guys. I like trains. I don't know things about them. I'm not Mickey Jo Trains. I never have been. But those original versions of their song featured lyrics like, come and bite my boygas. I'm hot and cheap and quick. My name's Pearl. I'm the first class girl My spring still bounce My fans still whirl there's also I'm duvet, I'm a sleeper but you won't get much sleep Wink. Oh, here we go. Buffy at your service ever. Open wide, My microwave is cooking to warm you from inside. And if you think I'm reading too much into these lyrics, I think maybe you've led a sheltered life up to this point, I'll be honest. But in any case, sexy train lyrics are out and train feminism is in. The other changes to the show that I'm aware of are they've changed the names of the national trains. So these are the trains from all around the world. So you have like the Japanese Bullet train, who used to be called Nintendo and now I believe is called Manga, which is just a different Japanese thing. There's a very British train that used to be called the King Charles something, and the name is now a joke about Brexit, which I think is hilarious, but probably won't be its name when it comes here. I don't know. The UK audiences like laughing at Brexit jokes, but probably not as much as European audiences like laughing at Brexit jokes. But I was going to tell you about the plot of the show and I got super sidetracked. Basically, it's all leading up to this race and we have these tensions between the trains that becomes this dialogue about the differences between the different types of engines, between diesel and electricity and steam and the way the show ends. I'm not sure as scientifically sound, honestly, scientists will be able to help me out here in the comments section if there are many scientists watching these videos, which you never know. But this is a spoiler for the show and the way it ends. FYI, it ends with Electra the electric train and Greaseball the diesel, both begging to be converted to steam because we have this whole thing about how electricity is wrong and evil for unspecified reasons, and diesel is for unbelievers and steam is the only way for a train to be. I don't know if that's either scientifically or environmentally sound. Maybe it is. I don't know. Someone. Someone can tell us down below. But basically, that is Starlight Express. It's campy, it's silly. I told you some of those lyrics before. It's basically cats, but for trains. And if you thought cats was needlessly sexual, then wait till you see Starlight Express. So let's talk about what we already know about this production. I have here the press release. I'm going to tell you what it says. First of all, it says, get your skates on. The legend is back. I'm excited. You should be too. The iconic musical returns to London in summer 2024. Specially designed Starlight Auditorium at Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre. They're calling it the Starlight Auditorium. That's fun. Producer Michael Harrison for Lloyd Webber Harrison Musicals is thrilled to announce that next summer, Angelo Webber's Starlight Express, which has been seen by over 20 million people across the world, will make its triumphant return to London. Another sidebar here. I don't know how they ever measure those statistics. Like, how do they not know how many of those are return visits by the same people? Anyway, not the point. Michael Harrison is a producer who has recently been working on a lot of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows. He produced the Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat revival hello. At the London Palladium that then toured and went to Canada. And on the back of that success, they formed this new coalition, Lloyd Webber Harrison Musicals, which has allowed Lloyd Webber to take a little bit of a step back from the active producing side, allowed him to be more of a creative impresario that he is, which I think is great for all involved. Michael Harrison is a terrific producer. He's also worked on the London Palladium pantomimes and Crazy for your right now in the West End. Their first production together under this banner has been Sunset Boulevard, which has just started previews with Nicole Scherzinger at the Savoy. And Starlight Express is going to be the second one. It says the brand new production will open in the purpose built, specially designed Starlight Auditorium at Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre with performances from 8th of June, 2024. Ticket on sale. Details will be announced in due course, but you can sign up for more information and updates@starlight expresslondon.com so the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre. This is where newsies was recently in this semi immersive revival. They did a few cool things with the auditorium. They built seating that went round the side of this thrust stage. They built some areas for the newsies to run around the outsides and kind of slide down onto the stage and swing in from the back of the auditorium. They did a lot of fun stuff and it certainly allows the brain to run wild thinking about what they could do for Starlight Express, because they can do anything they want here. Which Lloyd Webber goes on to tell us later in this press release. Here's what he has to say. He says, I am thrilled that Starlight Express will be powering down the tracks again. And you get the sense that he really is and has a tremendous fondness for this show. This was inspired by his kids playing with toy trains, and he wrote this musical for them. And I think there's a real sweetness to that. The world's first truly immersive musical. I'm gonna circle back to that. Will this time be an experience like no other. Watch out for the big new plot twist. I didn't know about this. I'm just reading this now for the first time. And you will discover why steam power is the future of railway. Again, we have this. There's an agenda. There is an absolute agenda to this musical. Is steam, Is that the most, like, environmentally conscious? And is that the best way forwards? Again, scientists, this is where we need you to weigh in. But you'll notice that he said, the world's first truly immersive musical. Now, this has been such a trend recently, not just at this theater with the semi immersive production of Newsies, but with Cabaret in the West End with Guys and Dolls, with Here Lies Love on Broadway with these actually genuinely immersive shows like the immersive Great Gatsby and all the Punch Drunk stuff. Sleep no More. But certainly recently, so many productions in London have tried to add in a feature that makes them pseudo immersive without fully committing to the concept. And Starlight Express was doing that back in the 80s. Because immersive right now for a lot of London producers means the actors will sometimes walk through the audience like they're Lea Michele at the end of season one of Glee performing Don't Rain on My Parade. And the trains used to skate all around the audience in Starlight Express decades ago. So that's why I called this show pioneering in many ways. And you can only imagine what they're going to be able to do with it now. Okay, I'm back because I forgot to tell you maybe the most exciting detail that's been dropped about this production, which is that the seats are going to move. Lloyd Webber teased. I can't even remember where I read this this morning, but Lloyd Webber has teased that the auditorium is going to do really cool things and that the seats are going to move. He just dropped that in with one of the details which you will remember happened in the West End production of Cinderella. Everybody's favorite. They had this thing where the front section of the stalls rotated. I have no idea what's gonna happen with Starlight Express at the Troubadour. Does this Mean, like, is this like, oh, no, they're doing the same thing as Cinderella. That's gonna be bad? No, I think that's perfect for Starlight Express. And it makes sense. Cinderella's problem was never the fact that the seats moved. It was the fact that the show that was happening while the seats moved wasn't very good. And that kind of like a futuristic, like, oh, this feels kind of like a Disney ride. Kind of an audience experience. Experience makes so much more sense for a show like Starlight Express than it did for a show like Cinderella. Anyway, back to the things I remembered to say when I was filming this video. I have no idea what this plot twist is based on, what he's implying. It reads a little bit like it's gonna be just the same plot of the show, but he does say new plot twist, and I'm gonna take that with a heaping teaspoon of salt. Now, I want to tell you about the creative team, because that's a big part of how we knew that this was going to be a completely, completely new production. It is going to be directed by Luke Shepard, who is one of my recent favourite directors. He directed and Juliet, which was in the West End and currently on Broadway. He directed In Dreams that I loved at Leeds Playhouse. Right now. His production of the Little Big Things has just opened. I posted my review late last night if you want to go and check that out. I think he's such a formidable creative force with such fresh and exciting ideas who loves to utilize a revolve and has this great knowledge of space and striking visual storytelling. I think he is the perfect exciting director to be attached to this show. And his name being on this press release has made me genuinely very excited. But he is surrounded by a great creative team. I should note, before we even get told about those, we get told that Arlene Phillips, Dame Arlene Phillips, excuse me, she is returning as a creative dramaturg. Now, she was a choreographer on the original production. She's a legend. Legendary choreographer. This time around, Ashley Nottingham is going to be choreographing whose work? I have to say I don't know. He's credited here with having choreographed Pacific Overtures. Is he an alumnus of Starlight Express? Has he been in it? I mean, I can't find out that he has, but he has worked with Luke Shepard and Arlene Phillips before, so there you go. But Arlene returning as creative dramaturg, I think is a great endorsement for this new production because she's been a choreographer and a director in her career. She has brilliant creative insight and she understands this show. She knows what makes this show work. The formula for that original production, the tone of that original production, that's still what we need now we don't have to reinvent the wheels of these trains. That was an accidental train joke. And they're surrounded by some great names as well. Like every other person on this creative team has a credit that makes you go, oh, my gosh. They're a leading creative in that field. Tim Hatley is doing the set design. He did the set design for Back to the Future Again, something that utilized wheels and cars and amazing visual elements. We had some screens. Really cool stuff. I'm very excited that he is attached to this. I was recently saying his name in the Devil Wears Prada video. He's gonna have a very busy 2024. We also have video design from Andre Goulding, who did the video design for Life of PI. That set was really cool, but the video design on the set was even cooler. Costume design of the most exciting current costume designers, Gabriella Slade, who won the Tony Award for her costume design for six. And you can immediately see how her kind of style is going to translate to Starlight Express. I'm excited about that collaboration. She has such expressive use of color and metallics. It's going to be great. Peplums. Peplums for everyone. Also, lighting design by Howard Hudson of and Juliet. Sound design by Gareth Owen of MJ the Musical, which I still haven't seen. And new orchestrations and musical supervision by Matthew Brind or Brind. I apologize. Luke Shepard has said nothing comes close to the thrill of Starlight Express. He's right. And it's a privilege to be directing this brand new production which will bring audiences right up close to all the music, the wonder and the action that makes this show so iconic. We hope it will take London by storm all over again and be both a celebration of this legendary work as well as passing the train set to a new generation in a big, bold and reimagined way. We can't wait to get our skates on. Scanning through this press release for more details. It says casting and all further information regarding the production will be announced in due course, but I am willing to speculate. So let's talk briefly about who we might like to see and who we might expect to see in Starlight Express next year. So when dreamcasting a show like Starlight Express, you also have this roller skating element to consider, right? You can't just say, oh, I want my favourite Six queens to be in this show. You don't know if they can roller skate. I've learned from personal experience it is not as easy as it looks. Or alternatively, I'm just really bad at it and should never attempt it again. That being said, I feel like Millie O'Connell is someone who would not only be great in Starlight Express, but also can probably roller skate. I could see her as one of the coaches for sure, even as Pearl. But there are also a lot of performers working in the West End right now who have done Starlight Express Express in Germany. A lot of UK performers travel over to Germany to go and do Starlight Express in German. They may return to the show. It's the kind of a show like A Cats or A Chorus Line, where you usually see alumni performers going back to it. Someone who could do that is Blake Patrick Anderson. He played Rusty over in Germany recently. In the uk, he's played Mark in Rent at the Hope Mill. He was our Michael in Be More Chill. He's been doing a lot of TV stuff recently, which is great for him. I don't know if he's even available, but if he is, I would love for him to be Rusty for a new UK production. I think that would be great. Now, when the show was last getting reworked, there was a workshop version of this at the other Palace Theatre and that featured Misha Parris as Mama, the role that used to be Popper and has been gender flipped. And if she can roller skate, I wouldn't be surprised if she was attached to this production, because as well as being a huge name as its title, Starlight Express, it would be helpful for them to have Star name in the cast as well. She has a little bit of awareness because of her music career and the reason for that is this is probably going to be a big auditorium with a lot of seats to sell, like Newsies was. And it's not in central London. The Troubadour Theatre is a little bit of a journey outside of central London, so it's a little bit of a harder task getting audiences there, especially tourists. But people are always willing to travel to Wembley when it's to see one of their favourite artists do a big concert at Wembley Arena. So if you have the right kind of star name as part of the show, and this is probably the easiest role to stunt cast because they do the least intense skating, then that would be helpful. Natalie McQueen was Dinah in that workshop, which I think is such inspired casting because she is the Queen of the country accent in the uk. She's currently living in the US with her boyfriend, Josh Groban, so I find it unlikely that she'd do this production. And again, I don't even know if she roller skates. But you can find that list of who was in that workshop production online. We may see some of them coming back to those roles. One thing that's good about the makeup of this cast is we have all of those international train characters which hopefully will give the show a built in diversity because fingers crossed, those roles get cast responsibly and those trains who are doing different international accents have some relationship to those backgrounds, especially where they are of different races, where we have like an Asian train character. Dear God, let them cast an Asian performer. But on top of all of that, it would be great to see some tocs in principal roles. That's trains of color. And it should be said that back in the day, this was a show that actually did a pretty good job of that compared to a lot of the other shows at the time. We've had black performers in the roles of Pearl and Elektra long before other shows were doing the same with their principal casting. Some shows still aren't. And there is one more casting idea I would really love to see in this new production. So Luke Shepard's most recent production has been the musical the Little Big Things. Based on the memoir of Henry Fraser. This features for wheelchair using performers in the cast. It's a story all about Henry's disability and his life. Now, this is a show that features four wheelchair users in its cast. And honestly, I see no reason whatsoever why this new production of Starlet Express shouldn't feature a wheelchair user or multiple wheelchair users. They're redesigning the space anyway and it has to be accessible for performers on wheels. That's a great opportunity to allow wheelchair users into this cast. A lot of the traditional barriers to inclusion for disabled performers who are wheelchair users shouldn't have to exist for this production. And where you've got a show where everyone is racing around on wheels, I just think it would be a great thing to feature. I can't imagine that this hasn't occurred to Luke Shepard based on the fact that he's just worked on the Little Big Things. Specifically, I think Amy Trigg would be a sensational diner. She's one of the cast members from that other show. I think she'd be terrific in this as Dinah or just one of the coaches. That would be an example of including a disabled performer in a way that is just incidental and isn't about their disability. But if we wanted to do something meaningful with the casting, you could cast a wheelchair user as Rusty, a train who is mocked by the other trains and told that he's never going to win the race because he's old and rusty and not as fast as them. I honestly think they could do something really exciting with this as a concept and I see no reason why it wouldn't be feasible. They could design a specific wheelchair, even that has more safety features when going around at high pace. They could do something motorized and super cool. And I'm going to be vocal about this in between now and then in the hopes that the powers that be in this production see this idea and go, you know what, we should absolutely do that because I think there is no reason not to and it would be great. But that is everything that we know so far about Starlight Express at the Troubadour Theatre, Wembley park in June of 2024. I'm so excited for this show to come back to London. I know a lot of you will be as well. If you've seen Starlight Express before anywhere around the world, let us know where you saw it. Let us know what you think of the show. What are you excited for in this new production and who would you like to see? Cast? Also scientists from before. Help me out because I don't, I don't know things about train science. But I do hope that you have enjoyed today's video. If you have, make sure to subscribe to my theatre thieved YouTube channel. Hopefully I will be going to see the show next year and there will be lots of vlog content around that and there will be a review. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, I might even be too excited about it to wait and I might have to go and see the long running production in Bochum, Germany. So if anyone knows anything about that show and has any advice about how to go and see that and the best way to do it, let me know in the comments or send me a message or an email. Thank you for watching this video. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.