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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
Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber

Productions3 on Broadway

1984 Transfer Theatre not recorded. · predates this show
1987 Gershwin Theatre Original. March 15, 1987 · Trevor Nunn 761 performances
2003 Transfer Theatre not recorded.

Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. 1 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.

Licensing not confirmed

Rights 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.

In the literature45 passages

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

Passages naming this show, found by keyword across 178 books. Where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.

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