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Before Starlight Express arrived in Las Vegas, all the shows were the stereotypical "showgirls, rhinestones, feathers" and the late night show was performed topless! Starlight was the first legit Musical Theatre show to be resident in the city. Compared to everything else going on in the city, even the "Vegas Showgirl" coaches were kinda conservative. My best guess is that the coaches got changed to feel more in line with the rest of the culture around.

What bugs me, is that the Components didn't change! The coaches are cute but not particularly sexy, while the components are supposed to be wild and it'd suit them much better!

I presume you're referring to "Whole Lotta Locomotion", the pussycat-dolls style song from the US Tour in 2003, rather than the original "Lotta Locomotion" from 1984... the original has some mild double-entendres, whereas the replacement is all "I need a big, hot, powerful engine to pick me up..." which, combined with the Vegas costumes and the slut-drop choreography, was definitely too much. Then add the German lyrics which were literally "A coach is a prize for the winner", and... yeah. A whole lotta not good messages.

do you think the Vegas coaches costumes are innapropirate

They were a bit (a lot) much in all honesty and there definitely ain’t no way someone is gonna find a way to explain why they choose these kind of costumes for a musical kids actually were supposed to see.

But it’s in the past and we sadly can’t travel into back in time to talk some sense into the costume designers.

We all could write a book about this though cause the line has been crossed a couple of times with this kinda stuff in general 💀

Especially looking at you ‘a lotta locomotion’ 🤨

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hey!!

just gotta say thanks for everything u do for the fandoms! having such a good, clear wiki is so useful when looking for references and so i thouhgt i would try to make my own wiki for a different fandom but theres just one thing i cannot find out how to do. i might be being so stupid right now so forgive me.

above each gallery photo, when you click on it, it says 'added by [user], posted in [production] [character] [actor]'. ive tried so hard to figure out how to do this but to no avail. ive added the pictures to the pages i need them in but they dont have the bit that says 'posted in [___]'. ive added the picutres to category pages thinking that would work, and it does make a category for the picutres but i cant get them to show up on all the pages i want them to. i just want the images to link to all the pages needed, but not as a caption below the gallery, if that makes sense?

im not sure if youre the right person to ask this to, so dont feel obligated to answer but thank you nonetheless! :o)

Hey! Wikis are such a learning curve, ugh there's still stuff I really struggle with - I edited a template successfully and that was a big victory! :P

Are you building your wiki on fandom.com? There's slight differences in how the wiki software works on different sites, and that can trip you up.

I'm not quite sure what's going wrong with your images - are they showing up in the gallery on the page you want them to? Categories are great for finding the images behind the scenes but I don't think that's the problem you're hitting.

The best advice I can give is always use the source editor! It gives you way more control, and for me (I'm dyslexic) the fact it's colour-coded is enormously helpful.

Use a sandbox as a scrap book, you should be able to make a personal one by making a new page (username)/Sandbox. Look at the code on other wikis - go to source editor as if you're editing the page then just don't save :D Just compare what the working one on another wiki looks like to yours. Little things like spaces at the beginning of lines can mess things up! But things that are infobox or template won't always copy across to your wiki - you need to add the templates to your own wiki and that's where I get lost! But the basic code is all standard, and looking at the code itself lets you control what's going where.

Good luck with it... it'll be so satisfying once you crack the problem and get it all exactly right!

#wiki editor

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computer show me bald electra

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I mean, technically yeah it's a revival, which is such an open book of whether it's a copy of the original or massively reworked - obviously it's the latter! The trouble is how many people are reading "It's back" and expecting the original.... or the 1992 show.. or like the 1998 show... or maybe the 2012 show that was last seen in the UK... actually I have no idea what people are expecting but nobody's expecting what we're gonna get!

Technically I'd say "2024" is better than "24" cos then it's clearly a date and not like... idk, 24th place or 24th November.... I've used StEx2018 and Bochum2018 on the wiki, so I'd suggest StEx2024 as the clearest option here.

I'll try to... moving forward. tag the new production posts with

something like... ldn24 or stex24

personally, I'm not sure if revival is the right word...hmmn

#stex2024

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I have a theory (probably wrong, but we'll see...) that Slick = Flat-top in personality, Lumber = Dustin, and Porter = CB BUT! Porter is a non-player, no Caboose plotlines, no scheming, no solos, no train wrecking. As useful as Flat-top is to the plot... hopefully has personality and is fun etc etc.

I'd guess Slick is an oil tanker, Lumber is a flat-bed hauling logs, and Porter is a caboose.

So we how we feeling about Freight atm lads? XD

Porter and Lumber (and most likely Slick (also called Slick Oil?) So far seem to be our Freight

Could be substitutes for CB, Dustin, Flat-Top?

Where are our Rockies? Or substitutes? Surely we would've heard about them by now??

#stex2024

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New Ensemble Engines!

Golden Eagle - a british luxury train!

Blue Horizon - tour the Canadian Rockies!

Lovely! What's next? uhm.

Orange Flash - google is only giving me info about horrific train accidents...

Grey Wolf - Back to Nazis.

#starlight express #starlight revival #stex2024

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Thoughts on Female Greaseball

I just wanted to share my thoughts, my concerns about changing gender for Greaseball. Now we don't know the extent to which they're rewriting the show, and these concerns may well be addressed, we'll have to wait and see... but follow along with me here...

First off, to tell a story, you need conflict and resolution. You got to show the bad things, to then overcome the bad things. Greaseball is an antagonist in the show - he does bad things, we, the audience, don't support his decisions. Sure he's a lovable character but he's flawed.

Greaseball is the "Reigning Champion", he represents the present world (Electra represents the undefinable weirdness and possibilities of the future, Poppa is the cozy nostalgic past.) He's representing some of the bad things we want to learn to do better from through the course of the story.

"UNCOUPLED" is sung by Dinah at her lowest point. She's just been dumped and from what she tells us in that song, it suggests her partner has been borderline gaslighting her and emotionally abusive - she's blaming herself for her partner's choices. Her partner that she's singing about has been really shitty to her.

Now, with a masculine Greaseball, we all immediately recognise the Misogyny there, all familiar tropes of "he's left me for someone younger, prettier, thinner, less outspoken" fuelled by the toxic masculinity, objectifying women. This is showing the bad stuff that the characters overcome - this is the story arc. Masculine Greaseball is a recognisable trope, he's "Alpha Male" - all the privilege has led him to being able to take whatever he wants. But Feminine Greaseball, a queer woman as antagonist who's been abusing sweet Dinah, what trope does she fall into? Evil Lesbian.

This is a sung-through roller-skating musical about toy trains, there isn't room to tell complex character development for the average audience member - these characters rely on archetypes to be easily recognisable. There's so much room for the performers to add subtlety, context, subtext, sure, but the main picture is painted in broad strokes. And I'm not sure that replacing "Toxic Alpha Male" as a villain, with "Evil Lesbian", is actually progressive.

Maybe they've thought this through and already have solutions... maybe "Evil Lesbian" is the trope they want for one of their antagonists. It just feels to me that it would be more productive to be working with "this macho alpha male crap is a problem" than taking it out of the discussion.

#starlight express #starlightexpressldn #Also how do we STILL NOT have femme Electra? #FFS!!! #Electra was the first canonically bi and gender fluid character in mainstream musical theatre #rocky horror was not mainstream for a good while! #So many questions if they've done the work to pull this off #stex2024

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It's a vicious spiral of who gets the role, who auditions for the show, who graduates from performing arts colleges, who gets into performing arts colleges. It's been getting whiter and whiter. Chicken and egg, where are the black performers? They can only cast the best applicant. Colleges only want students who are gonna get good careers. Students are inspired and driven when they see role models...

When they were casting "Killerwatt" in 2018 they specifically auditioned for performers with a "Black and Minority Ethnic" background, and they ended up with someone... Welsh. No shade on him but despite them specifically looking for Black performers they failed!

The 1990s and 2000s showed complacency for social issues - people fought so hard in the 60s, 70s. 80s, and seemed to achieve the equality they needed. But things settled into, for Starlight example, Electra, Rockies, Krupp are black guys. Not really considering having black swings covering all the random roles, which meant there was a generation of performers through the 1990s, career Starlight performers. As they aged out of the show, there weren't replacements, no younger performers following in their footsteps.

Starlight tends to cast young graduates, and that pool of talent has become less diverse over the past couple of decades. It's like, there's roles for black performers, sure, great! But it's less colour-blind in general. And as that older generation of performers stopped renewing their contracts and left the show, the casting director needed more and more fresh graduates.

However, maybe things are swinging back the other way now, despite being a Londoner myself I'm loving how the German production is looking less and less West End-centric, far more European talent getting on wheels. But there's definitely a whole section of the history of Starlight where things are not great for diversity.

I find it incredibly interesting that for a very long time Electra was played consistently and almost exclusively by black actors but then at a certain point in like the 2000s or something they just. Stopped. What's up with that.

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it's been cut a couple times - Vegas I think? and it was missing from most of the workshop performances. Give me my beautiful London Rockies at the peak of physical fitness and it's a jaw-dropping number to watch live! But… the plot kinda stops for the number, and it runs just fine without it. Very valid question how it's survived when other, more important numbers have not. Why Keep Right Place Right Time but cut down Wide Smile to basically not exist?

out of all the cut songs, why is right place right time not one of them

your telling me lotta Locomotion, girls rolling stock, there's me, belle the sleeping car, and multiple others got cut. but right place right time made it?????

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I don't have audience numbers, but the Japan/Australia tour was so popular they went back to do another production in Japan a couple years later... and that was playing in stadiums.

„Around the world“ is a funny euphemism for „Bochum, Germany“

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It's definitely not just you. I was lucky enough to see some of the great performers from the 80s and 90s before they retired, Jan Apel, Martin Boothe, Drue Williams, Adam Floyd, Samantha Lane, and of COURSE Dawn Leigh Woods... and yes the show is not the same level of skating that it was! I wonder if it's partly cultural - it seems that back in the day there was a culture of risk-taking, trying new stunts and new feats, pushing the limits - that could, and did, result in injury. Injuries of course bad for the performer, but also bad for the company in extra costs and time needed. But those risks also paid off for the spectacular skating!

You definitely could never expect, or ask, professional performers to risk their health and livelihood to skate bigger and wilder tricks. But they're also rational adults who can make their own risk assessments as to if they want to try to do more, and the show used to offer them a showcase for their skills.

You'd think making the show easier, and safer, would result in fewer injuries, but it doesn't seem to have made a significant difference post-2018?

idk if it's just me or what but I feel like the show has just gotten less and less athletic over the years. Like I understand that they are only tried for like 2 months to dance and sing while skating but still. The jumps aren't as high, they don't seem to be as many tricks anymore. I just kinda miss it I guess, its part of the spectacle. Don't get me wrong there are still so many cool things in the show but after watching a bunch of bootlegs and megamixes back to back you start to subconsciously analyze everything.

So anyway yeah, I miss when Greaseball did those extra high jumps and when he would jump into the splits. It was pretty hot ngl...

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The 1984 story did benefit from the streamlining that resulted from Broadway - not the Broadway version, that wasn't streamlined, but by the time they got the show out to Japan / original Bochum, they had it in pretty good shape. That show needed some modernisation now, yes, but tweaks not complete rewrites. However, I know what we're getting is the 2018 material being given to a new creative team. I HOPE there's a good amount of development from the 2018 material - but that was all developed specifically for this new English production.

If you have a specific production or additions you'd like to add feel free! :] (There are too many revisions to include in this poll)

(And by "keep" I mean keep exactly the way it is)

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TBH I doubt we will, because there's two ways they could have taken the revsions... they could have fixed the gender imbalance in the show, but instead they focused on the gender imbalance. It's important to the changes that Coco is female, for example. The way the show currently is, it's about gender, so to tell the story, the characters have to be a set gender. But! New director coming in, may have the freedom to shake things up! Maybe he'll focus on the story of the race night, and just tell that child's dream in a better, balanced way. And if he's just telling us the story of the races, not telling us a story about gender, then there's a lot more space to be flexible in what performers play what roles!

Something i actually am hoping to see in the revival are female Electra covers and more female Rockie covers for not just Rockie 3. I think it’s high time for that to happen

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Yeah, my legit answer is leaning more into the Cinderella aspect, Rusty transformation costume during/after the Starlight Sequence, and nobody recognises him after.

Otherwise? Well, the poster is an easter egg- the Starlight Express is actually Greaseball!

What do you think Mr Andy's "Big Twist" is gonna be?

(Joke answers and legit answers are both acceptable)

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Please, everyone, be grounded and manage your expectations. There is so much to be positive about and optimistic, as long as you keep an open mind. If you're expecting the current show but performed in English, you're gonna be disappointed. This is a non-replica revival, almost entirely new creative team. If you're expecting the original production restored, you're gonna be disappointed. see above.

If you're expecting something - anything specific, particular casting, live races, mohawk wigs, backflips - you're lining yourself up for a high chance of disappointment because we know NOTHING specific yet.

You gotta go in with an open mind that an objectively very cool creative team have assembled with the best possible venue, they're taking the material that ALW is giving them (which is the 2018 rewrites - the entire point of rewriting the German production was to workshop for this English language production. sorry for the disrespect to the German audiences but that's how it is). New Director, new Choreographer, new designs. Arlene Phillips supervising.

It's just far too early to have any valid constructive criticism.

You will NOT catch me saying ANYTHING remotely negative about the london revival. I am open to anything at this point. I am thoroughly excited. I want this revival to thrive. We're getting a BRAND NEW PRODUCTION. It's coming BACK TO LONDON. The costume designer is the one who did COSTUMES FOR SIX. Do you understand how amazing this could be. Try not to think about the negatives. Be hopeful. What a wonderful age to live in where we get to see Stex finally have a production outside of Germany in what seems like forever.

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"fix the plot so the character arcs are all strong" ... is that one decision? :D

You get one creative decision for the London Revival 2024

What is it?

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My only hesitation is vocal ranges for singing the music, but damn does Rusty need a good high tenor these days, and Mama is all over the place already. And it makes sense - big bulky engines are gonna be fast on straight tracks, but smaller, sleek manouverable engines are gonna corner better and handle the course well, let's find out who's the best racer then!

And let's be honest, Pearl must have inspired thousands of drag queens...

First thought for the ‘big twist’ in the new production of Starlight Express: gender-blind casting. It’d be a lot of fun, it’d be very chaotic, and it’d make the Daily Mail explode. What’s not to love