Starlight Express
Shows · Starlight Express
Starlight Express is a 1984 musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Richard Stilgoe. It tells the story of a young but obsolete steam engine, Rusty, that races in a championship against modern locomotives of diesel and electric engines in the hope of impressing a first-class/observation car, Pearl.
- Opened
- 1987
- Performances
- 761
- Type
- Musical
- Era
- Megamusical
Productions4 on Broadway
| 1984 | Transfer Theatre unknown. · predates this show | |
| 1984 | Apollo Victoria Theatre Original. · predates this show | |
| 1987 | Gershwin Theatre Original. March 15, 1987 · Trevor Nunn | 761 performances |
| 2003 | Transfer Theatre unknown. |
Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. 2 of these predate the show itself and are almost certainly a different work of the same name. Shown, marked, not merged. West End runs are not yet held.
Recordings 17 albums held
Licensing not confirmed
| Rights | Not confirmed We have not been able to confirm the publisher. |
Read from the licensor's own pages and catalogues. Rights move, and an empty row means we have not confirmed a publisher, not that the show cannot be licensed.
45 passages naming Starlight Express, found by keyword across 178 books. It's where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.
At a cost of well over $8 million — the highest in Broadway history — Starlight. book:broadway-musicals-show-by-show-seventh-edition-stanley-green-cary-ginell#p268
A presold hit with an $18 million advance, the show made Andrew Lloyd Webber the first composer to have three musicals running simultaneously in London and New York. (The other two: Cats and Starlight Express .) book:broadway-musicals-show-by-show-seventh-edition-stanley-green-cary-ginell#p272
At a cost of well over $8 million—the highest in Broadway history—Starlight Express solidified the British invasion by joining Cats, Me and My Girl, and Les Misérables as one of the four biggest Main Stem attractions during the first half of 1987. book:broadway-musicals-show-by-show-green-stanley-green-kay-5th-ed-rev-and-updated-by#p300
Andrew Lloyd Webber first mounted a “cabaret” production of Aspects of Love in 1983 at the annual music festival on his Sydmonton estate. The musical again involved him with his The Phantom of the Opera colleagues Charles Hart, Gillian Lynne, Maria Bjornson, and Andrew Bridges, and reunited him with director Trevor Nun… book:broadway-musicals-show-by-show-green-stanley-green-kay-5th-ed-rev-and-updated-by#p307
The next production at this theatre, the British spectacular Starlight Express (1987), required the theatre to be turned into a gigantic roller rink, with the cast rollerskating on ramps and bridges around the stage to give the impression of being railroad cars. One of the costliest productions ever staged on Broadway… book:at-this-theatre-100-years-of-broadway-shows-stories-and-botto-louis-viagas-rober#p344
Mackintosh struck box office gold with Cats, later continuing his association with Andrew Lloyd Webber with Starlight Express and the remarkable The Phantom of the Opera. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p271
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