230. Rollerskating back in time
I don’t have to be a kid to harness the starlight.
In which Rebecca describes boarding the Starlight Express last week for its new-look journey, and remembers some music which has always meant so much.
Dear Reader,
My first experience of a stage musical had been Cats on Broadway during our trip to New York to visit family in the early 1980s. As a small child I wasn’t sure what we’d see happening, but it certainly wasn’t human-sized cats prowling the auditorium as soon as the lights went down. When the show started my brother was so overcome with excitement that he stood up suddenly, his folding seat snapping shut behind him.
The music was wonderful. I knew one of the songs already, because I’d been listening to Elaine Paige’s record, Stages, on repeat. Paige, who’d been cast in a number of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s productions over the years, had played the role of Grizabella in the London show, and her showstopper song was Memory.
After only a couple of bars of my tuneless vocal rendition of the song, which Grizabella and I sang with equal gusto, I heard a strangled ‘SHHHHHHH!’ from the seat next to me. ‘But it’s my favourite sooooooong!’ I hissed back.
Mum shook her head. I stopped singing.
Before The Greatest Showman had even been a glint in the eye of Twentieth Century Fox there was Barnum. We came home with the soundtrack on cassette, and one song would stop me in my tracks every time I played it.
One Brick at a Time marks that point at which Barnum and his team are constructing his museum, and in the song the build is used as a metaphor for the determination required to achieve success. I still sing these lines to myself when I need a reminder that I can achieve whatever I’ve set my mind to:
That empty field it can yield miles and miles of flowers
You don’t need to magic powers
Just a seed and showers
From the floor to the sky
You can soar if you’re wise enough to climb
One brick at a time.Lyrics by Michael Stewart
The original production of Starlight Express had premiered at the Victoria Apollo Theatre, London, right next to Victoria Station, in 1984. My Girl Guide troupe had organised a group trip to the show, and Mum and my brother joined the gang of giggling girls for the occasion.
Reader, it knocked my socks off. There was so much colour and movement that it was hard to know where to look. And after seeing the show, and right up until it closed in 2002, I’d look at its billboard outside the theatre every time I took a train to or from London Victoria, and would dream of one day seeing it again.
We purchased the soundtrack to Starlight Express on a double cassette, and I played it relentlessly. I loved reliving in sound everything I’d seen as the story had developed and the characters had skated around me, and one song would always hit me right between the eyes. It was nothing to do with the inevitable ‘boy meets girl’ element of the plot – heck, I was too young back then to care – but something about the journey of one of the characters – the fact that they had stepped up, tried, failed, tried again and succeeded – has never left me.
WARNING
This audio-only clip from YouTube is a teensy bit of a plot-spoiler. Listen with caution if you haven’t seen the show and have plans to do so! Oh, and grab a hanky…
Running late for an appointment last summer when my car really needed fuel, I was indicating to pull into the garage when I recognised the opening notes of a song which always moves me. Now, the context in which we hear a song can influence how deeply it affects us. If I choose to put on a song which means a great deal to me, its impact on my emotions and the reaction I have to it will be far less than if it takes me by surprise. In this case, the opening bars of Climb Ev’ry Mountain from The Sound of Music took my breath away – and along with it any chance that my car would get its fix of fuel that day.
I couldn’t not listen. I drove straight past the pumps and back onto the road, just so I didn’t miss a single note of a song which ever since I saw The Sound of Music for the first time has to me represented grit, determination and the promise of happiness.
Last summer I was thrilled to discover that Starlight Express was coming back to London. The show was described in the press by its creative team as ‘a completely new experience, rather than one that recycles the look and feel of past productions.’
I booked our tickets immediately.
Although I love a nostalgic and idealistic view of life which a 1980s musical might bring to contemporary culture, I’ll admit that any twenty-first-century reworking of such a thing needs to be updated to reflect current social norms.
Back when I first saw Starlight Express I loved the number ‘He Whistled at Me’, but neither that song nor that attitude which skated alongside it had made it to this reworking.
What’s more, rather than omit entirely the reference to engines (back then all boys, as it happens) whistling at the attractive rolling stock (the girls of the piece), in this new version when a male character does overstep the mark by voicing his desire to whistle at a potential love interest he is given short shrift, along with a firm explanation as to why such behaviour is inappropriate.
Locomotive technology has come on a bit, too, in the four-plus decades which have passed since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe wrote their musical about a toy train track coming to life. The inevitability of progress – the Vorsprung durch Technik [progress through technology] so beloved of Audi’s marketeers – is demonstrated by the introduction of several characters and songs not in existence in the original production I’d seen.
So many changes made me wonder whether one should ever really revisit a much-loved experience of the past, in case one comes away disappointed.
‘We always go to the same place on holiday – we love it there so much that we’d never consider anywhere else!’ say some.
‘I want to leave somewhere knowing that I’ve had the BEST TIME, and that means I can never go back, in case I don’t’, say others.
Both viewpoints, of course, are valid. For me, somehow the prospect of revisiting Starlight Express last week felt more perilous to my past than a promise for the present. And gosh, Jim was in the seat next to me; Jim, with his family history of heritage railways. This visit to the theatre all of a sudden felt like a huge responsibility.
🚂
I thought about it. Revisiting a beautiful view, a gorgeous hotel, the location of our best trip ever, is always going to result in a different experience. Next time we might find that development has changed our favourite landscape, that the hotel we’d loved so much isn’t quite the same now, and that heck, the beaches are far too crowded these days.
Those things change, of course they do, but in that same period so do we, and so does social culture. When it’s dressed in the costume of a distant memory, a familiar experience is always going to look different when viewed with fresh eyes. And hey, that’s absolutely as it should be.
👍
So, how was the show? Reader, it was fabulous. I wanted to stay on that metaphorical platform for the next train and the next; I wanted more skating, more flashing lights, more music, more ‘will they, won’t they?’, and yes, even more starlight. Starlight was what I was there to harness and oh boy, my sky is full.
I knew already from Barnum that it takes just one brick at a time to build something amazing, and from The Sound of Music that I can jolly well climb every mountain I need to in order to find my dream. Could it be that I am the instrument of my own happy ending, something which the musicals I have loved since my childhood had first shown me all those years ago?
Yes, I am that instrument. Because I am the starlight, and just as the song in the musical tells me, I can achieve anything. And while I watched those anthropomorphic trains whizz past me in a whirl of colour and sound last week, I couldn’t think of anything else in the world that might have moved me more.
Love,
Rebecca x
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Regular readers of ‘Dear Reader, I’m Lost' will know that I have an ongoing writing relationship with Terry Freedman of Eclecticism: Reflections on literature, writing and life in the form of regular, light-hearted correspondence. It’s my turn to reply to him next time.
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I love that this whole post dovetails neatly into the idea that we are indeed instruments for our own happiness. It’s a simple philosophy. Thank you, Rebecca.
Hi Rebecca, I loved reading this, and now I'm humming Do: A deer, a female deer.
Re: A drop of golden sun...LOL! This was one of my favorite musicals growing up. I like to believe that my parents named me Julie after Julie Andrews. :)
Thank you, Rebecca, and have a beautiful weekend.