Forty years after it first opened, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s roller-skating musical extravaganza Starlight Express is back on stage. Admittedly less well-remembered than the 1984 London production – although just as significant for this writer – was a show mounted 11 years later, at the Pavilion in Llandrindod Wells, where, in a spirit of unbridled optimism, my primary school had a crack at staging this audacious, absurd musical about cosmic racing trains.

The original production has got to be one of the most technically ambitious shows ever to grace the West End, with the entire cast on roller skates, racing each other around the auditorium. My primary school bussed all the juniors to watch it at the Apollo Victoria, before attempting to recreate the show back home in a community hall in mid Wales. Which is, frankly, its own shoot-for-the-stars kind of ambitious.

And no, this wasn’t some well-funded private school with a massive arts budget: it was a rural state school, with a handful of passionate teachers who put in hours of their own time to stage a yearly production, hoping their pupils would fall in love with musicals too. Granted, in our Starlight Express, most kids weren’t on roller skates (although I did do some laps on roller blades) and the ‘starlight’ was largely created via handheld torches – but it was still completely magical to be part of.

It’s also a fine example of the impact that watching theatre can have as part of our education. Watching, and performing, that show certainly sparked a love affair for me: for Starlight Express, for musicals, for theatre. I can still feel the tingling excitement of watching the original – the thrill as actors whizzed by on skates; the twinkling magic of the whole auditorium lighting up. Afterwards, my best friend Carys and I would regularly recreate the entire musical, song by song, dressing up and roller skating around the tiled floor of the Quaker Meeting House I grew up next to, playing the cast recording on cassette. 

She now works as a set and costume designer, and I reckon I can also trace a line between being a theatre critic and those ambitious teachers and that original production. Starlight Express sprinkled a special kind of stardust on our imaginations. 

So it’s fair to say that, when the new production at the Troubadour Theatre in Wembley was announced, I was more than a little excited – and also nervous. Could it ever live up to my memories?

I should probably point out that these days, I’m no Lloyd Webber superfan – I like some of his shows, others leave me cold. And I have enough distance to recognise that the score for Starlight Express, a couple of bangers or entertaining parodies aside, is not his best work. But, as it turns out, that doesn’t matter.

Watching the new Starlight, it became immediately apparent that I would be incapable of evaluating it fairly. I don’t exactly think of myself as a hardened critic, but I’m never quite as jelly-like as this: within minutes, certain melodies that have been sitting dustily in the back of my brain started soaring through me again, and I actually found myself welling up. Long-lost lyrics floated into my mind. Strap me into a pair of roller skates and I reckon I could probably be wheeled out as a spare chorus member – it’s all still in there. Watching Starlight is like time-travelling back to being nine, and experiencing whole-hearted, uncritical and rather obsessive first love.

And honestly, performers on roller skates hurtling around an auditorium will never not be thrilling: it’s a completely mad idea, especially as most of the actors have to learn to skate for the show. But it’s also just irresistibly fun. At the Troubadour, I could literally feel the air swishing in my face as they flew by.  

Still, the production was less overwhelming than I remembered – whether this is because the track around the Troubadour feels half the size it was in the Apollo Victoria, or because I was half the size when I first watched it, I’m not quite sure. While there was still a fizz of genuine danger in the racing, I could’ve sworn the skating was faster, slicker and more stunt-based in the original show. Or is that just a trick of memory?

Of course, there’s lots that’s deliberately different about the story and characters – rightly so. Out goes Ashley the smoking carriage, in comes Tassita the quiet coach. The addition of a hydrogen truck – “a hero of net zero” – proves an eco-friendly update. That said, some aspects need no updating: props must be given to ALW for the early bisexual representation. Electra the electric engine singing: “AC/DC, it’s okay by me/I can switch and change my frequency,” is still, frankly, iconic.

Sadly, the witless plot is also still a bit creaky: a steam train named Rusty tries to prove his worth to first-class carriage Pearl by competing against diesel and electric engines. The gender politics didn’t bother me in the 1990s – I just wanted to be pretty-in-pink Pearl – but today it feels pretty old-fashioned, even with some welcome updates. In the original, all the female characters were carriages, hitching themselves to the powerful male engines; here, the diesel engine is a woman at least, and one of the miniskirt-wearing carriages is played by a man. The carriages also get a new song about doing things for themselves – it’s bland, and not actually reflected in the action, but at least attempts to give them some agency, I suppose.

Probably my favourite change, in Luke Sheppard’s new direction, is that a child is on stage throughout: Starlight Express is their dream, taking place after their mum tells them to put their toy trains away and tucks them up in bed. In the original, they were just a voice-over; here, they’re central, conducting the action. What a handy proxy, for my own young self! And what a handy proxy for any kids in the audience today: I hope it encourages a whole new generation to see themselves in this story – with all its silly joy, its dazzling stagecraft, its sheer cosmic excitement. I hope it makes them fall in love with theatre, too – heck, maybe even get their school to put on its own production.