No one ever sensibly accused Andrew Lloyd Webber of lacking a nose for success.
Smelling a good thing, after his unprecedented lodestone in bringing kitty cats to musical theater in the early `80s, he shrewdly turned to another childhood obsession: choo-choo trains.
”Starlight Express” is the roller-skating result, wherein actors attired themselves not as felines but as locomotives and box cars. It opened in 1984 in London, where it`s still running, and on Broadway in 1987.
Though not the success of ”Cats” or ”The Phantom of the Opera” later, ”Starlight” seemingly boasted enough popularity and charm of subject, along with Lloyd Webber`s name as money-making imprimatur, to guarantee large local productions in major U.S. cities and a smaller national tour.
But that`s not the way it happened. ”Starlight” never got its own official Los Angeles company, failing to follow in the footsteps of ”Cats,” ”Phantom” and ”Les Miserables” (not a Lloyd Webber show). Nor was there a major-city production like the ”Phantom” now at our own Auditorium Theatre and set to move on to other large American centers.
”Starlight” came fully equipped with a technical nightmare: Its winding, extravagant runways, on which the skater-performers zoomed around the entire theater in conjuring up the magical whiz of the locomotion, took months to install in its London and Broadway homes. It was, for a show all about a mythic mode of travel, intriguingly immobile in theatrical conception.
But about a year ago its enterprising creators went back to the drawing board to devise a version of its technical splendor that would capture the delight of the original but prove a portable train set as well.
The result finally will arrive for an engagement Wednesday throught Oct. 28 at the Chicago Theatre. Not surprisingly, those responsible boast that they`ve worked miracles.
The newer version, they swear, is even better.
”I`ve worked on four different productions,” says Randy Whitescarver, the touring company`s production stage manager, ”and this is the best.
”Before, we installed over a period of three to six months. Now we have to install in 12 hours, so obviously the set has been scaled down. But the good thing is that it`s more personable. The actors aren`t dwarfed by a three- story set and the mechanics of moving bridges.
”You can see them and the story much better.”
Even miniaturized, ”Starlight” (which features lyrics by Richard Stilgoe) is a traveling technical mouthful. It requires 10 trucks of equipment, including a 50,000-pound lighting truss, its own stage designed for skating and a special runway, which thrusts 50 feet into the orchestra seats. ”Usually, a road show moves in and uses the equipment in each theater,” Whitescarver says. ”We`re a self-contained unit. We rent four walls and tell them to clear everything out. We bring it all in ourselves.”
The result, he adds, is a combination of legitimate theater, sporting event and rock `n` roll show.
”Unless you`ve been to a rock concert, you may never have even seen the lighting and special effects we use,” Whitescarver says.
They include laser lighting, holograms and a live-action animated film segment, beamed by two 35 mm projectors, to restore some of the action cut back because of the change in set construction.
Jeremiah Harris, the show`s technical supervisor, says the altered result still makes for the largest road show ever.
One testament to the bigness of it all can be found in the breakdown in personnel. Of an entourage of 77, only 34 are performing cast members. The rest are technical support workers, compared with the usual 2 to 1 ratio for cast versus tech personnel.
Though it`s not a surprise that those responsible are a little boastful, the success of all the efforts that went into getting ”Starlight” on the road has its factual barometers.
The show has played some 30 cities in its first year and is booked for the next 12 months; it is doing better financially, according to Harris, than any other company of the musical so far.
As for the quality of the remount, which features staging by Arlene Phillips, who choreographed the London original and directed the tour, the production won top honors last month from the South Florida Entertainment Writers` Association, a drama critics organization that named the production the best road show to play the Miami region in 1989-90.
Touring shows have dwindled to a trickle in the last decade, and in an industry in which good news is rare, ”Starlight,” at a phenomenal budget of $5 million, laden with 50 tons of scenery, is a standout. That goes a long way toward rewarding those who, in dealing with it week after week, don`t hesitate to admit to having a tough job:
”It`s a bear to keep this show up and running,” Harris says. ”You wouldn`t believe how much we have to deal with.”
