Toward The Freight Yards of Fiasco STARLIGHT EXPRESS Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber; Lyrics by Richard Stilgoe

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When its elaborately contoured three-story set is lit up like a giant pinball machine, its 60-ft. suspended bridge is rotating in open air, its funk-rock score is blasting so loudly that it vibrates spectators right out of their chairs, and its 27-member cast is whizzing by on roller skates at speeds of up to 30 m.p.h., attired in what looks like a cross between medieval jousting costumes and high-tech robot gear, Starlight Express is surely one of the most astonishing spectacles in the annals of the stage. If likely to baffle and frustrate regular theatergoers, it may also enthrall brand-new audiences, especially those under the age of reason. Inspired in equal measure by the roller derby, Coney Island fun fairs and the smoke bomb-accented variety of rock concert, Starlight turns a small boy's dream about model-train racing into an $8 million extravaganza, the most expensive show in Broadway history.

It remains to be seen whether the money was well spent: advance ticket sales are holding steady at $5.6 million, and the production has already broken house records at the Gershwin Theater, Broadway's biggest. But weekly operating costs exceed $300,000, and according to Producer Martin Starger, Starlight would have to play to almost 90% of capacity just to recoup its investment within a year.

Artistically, Starlight hurtles toward the freight yards of fiasco. Even by its own standards -- its creators seek to be judged in the context of Disneyland, not Sweeney Todd -- it is too much of the same thing going on for too long. And unlike Disneyland, Starlight is a passive experience: the audience doesn't come along for the ride, physically or emotionally. After opening moments of real wonder, the dramatic tension depends increasingly on what tricks the set can do next: opening the floor to send up a concealed bedroom or judging stand; filling the midnight sky with stars that sketch a celestial madonna in a surge of unexamined theological kitsch. Against this whizbangery, the actors make scant impression, although Robert Torti is an oily villain and Greg Mowry a winsome underdog. Andrew Lloyd Webber's pastiche of American pop offers histrionic passages but no memorable tunes. Worse, the races -- the core of the plot -- look contrived. When one "engine" passes another, no burst of athletic elan justifies the triumph; sometimes the jockeying for position takes place out of view, sometimes the team fated to lose just reins itself in short of the finish line.

Starlight, which opened in London in 1984, comes from a glittering team: Director Trevor Nunn, Set Designer John Napier and Lighting Designer David Hersey, who mounted Nicholas Nickleby, plus Composer Lloyd Webber and Lyricist Richard Stilgoe, who had joined the former trio to devise Cats. In reconceiving the show for Broadway, the creators had some smart ideas: instead of a gloomy, abandoned train siding, the gaudy set now represents a panorama of the U.S., dotted with highlights a child might recognize, from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge; the recorded narration too is now by a child: Braden Danner, who appears live in the Main Stem's other big new musical, Les Miserables. Along with these bright ideas came a dumb one: instead of having the skating encircle the audience, as in London, the races now take place within the confines of the stage. Thus there is no longer much sense of the spectator's being part of the action. At Coney Island, the roller derby or rock concerts, that feeling is the essence of the fun.