![]() ![]() “I think it’s also going to be much more fun. I’ve been playing around with ideas about the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate in San Francisco. Now I think it is going to be more romantic. “We started out with the stadium version for America which was very hi-tech. It is going to be changed quite a bit from what we did first time out but more in the nature of the show rather than the mechanics. The skating circuits will be on two levels rather than three. ![]() Napier said: “Without the proscenium we have got 150-foot breadth of stage, which is much larger than in London. Lloyd Webber has already made minor revisions on his original score which have also been incorporated into the West End show. John Napier has already supervised the removal of the proscenium stage arch from the Gershwin and is anticipating considerable changes from the London production. Nunn and Napier, who greatly expanded the smash-hit of Cats on its journey into the Winter Garden, have been installed in New York since early November working on both Starlight Express and another huge London hit, Les Misérables, due to open at the Broadway Theatre on March 12. We should have gone straight to Broadway much earlier.” Lloyd Webber now says: “That was interesting, but I think it was a mistake. They saw it as a traveling fairground on permanent tour visiting the big arenas usually played by the major rock bands. The production team, led by director Trevor Nunn and designer John Napier, saw it traveling across the Atlantic in a different form. It has taken three years for Starlight to reach Broadway but not through any lack of confidence. It was a new form of theatre, an irresistible success and it is still playing in London today not just as an inevitable magnet to visitors from America and elsewhere but also one of the most expensive tickets in town. To a pounding beat the 30-strong cast skated round the theatre passing through in front of and behind the audience, touching speeds of 40 miles an hour or more and all synchronized not just to the score but to the way the various ramps and bridges met them and delivered them onto their next lap. It was a revelation.Ĭome with me now to that keenly anticipated first night when Lloyd Webber was unveiling his first major new show since Cats. One of London’s largest theatres had been reconstructed at a cost of over $2 million to accommodate three circuits of laminated wood runways suitable for high speed roller-skating.Īnd over the stage hung a colossal girder bridge which with computerized precision would revolve, dip and rise to give the skaters access to the various circuits which ran around the audience on three levels (orchestra, mezzanine and balcony). Starlight is now in preparation to open at the Gershwin Theatre in New York on March 15, but the memory of the novelty it brought to musical theatre remains strong from that first experience. That was my private and exclusive introduction to Starlight Express when the show was still in rehearsal in London in early 1984. “Watch out for the trains,” said Andrew Lloyd Webber, and with cautions look in every direction, he led me through a theatre as I had never seen one before. ![]()
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