Capitalism, optimism and diversity: how 80s musical Starlight Express changed my life

If I had to choose a cultural artefact that most underpinned my 1980s childhood, it would be the Andrew Lloyd Webber mega-musical Starlight Express . The show is around the same age as me, and I’ve come to think of it as the prism through which it is possible to unpick more than my own memories, but the dreams and nightmares of the decadent decade that gave birth to it.

When Starlight Express launched in 1984 at London’s Apollo theatre, the world had never seen anything like it before. A truly immersive experience, it involved actors on roller-skates racing through and around the audience in a purpose-built auditorium, and broke ground with its diverse casting, at one point hiring more Black actors than the rest of the West End combined. James Baldwin was often backstage to visit his friend Lon Satton, a longtime cast member, and another member of the cast, Jeffrey Daniel, invented the moonwalk that Michael Jackson made famous (MJ was also a fan of the show, and visited on more than one occasion).

My dad, the actor and singer Richie Pitts, joined the cast a year after the show opened, and would go on to play Poppa and the mythical eponymous train in one of many productions that travelled the world, from Vegas to Tokyo, Mexico City to Sydney and Broadway to Bochum in Germany, the latter production still going, holding the world record for most visitors to a single theatre. Now, the show has returned to London for the first time in more than 20 years. Naturally, I took along family and friends. The experience set me off on a strange rollercoaster ride through space and time, as I re-boarded the midnight train.

Tokyo, 1987

The first stop is at one of my earliest and happiest memories. I’m sat next to my mom and the lights are low in the cavernous interior of a building shaped like a spaceship – the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, designed for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics by Japan’s then foremost architect, Kenzo Tange. The darkness in the stadium is pierced only by shards of crisscrossing lilac laser beams, cutting through an electric mist left by pyrotechnics, and lime green glow sticks held by spectators sitting in excited silence. Suddenly, small artificial stars appear and a voice booms from the ether:

“If only you’d use the power within you
Needn’t beg the world to turn around and help you
If you draw on what you have within you
Somewhere deep inside…”

The words are being sung by my dad, on the first Japanese tour of Starlight Express, a musical about a young child – around my age – who drifts off into a dream where trains assume human-like qualities and enter a championship race on “the most important night in the history of the world”. Our allegiances are immediately with the plucky underdog Rusty, an old-fashioned steam engine, who has to compete with, among others, Electra, the mysterious hi-tech train of the future, and Greaseball, a jock-like diesel engine – both the equivalent of 1980s high school bullies. They vie for the attentions of Pearl, the quintessential 80s female lead, who falls somewhere between Sandy from Grease and Jem from Jem and the Holograms . It seems Rusty has no chance, but he has my dad, the God-like Starlight Express on his side.

The trains are represented by actors on roller skates dressed in LED-laden costumes that look like my Transformers toys, and exhilarating races are undertaken by highly skilled Japanese stunt doubles, many of whom were brought in from Super Sentai – a TV show that would later inspire The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers .

Starlight is powered by late capitalism at its zenith, sponsored by 80s video game giant Namco and Kirin, one of Japan’s biggest beverage companies, as well as the mighty Seibu Corporation, then owned by Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who topped the first Forbes rich list in 1987. Prince Edward is the show’s production assistant! The result is a glamorous, futuristic spectacle, in keeping with the city that surrounds it; this is Tokyo at the height of the “bubble economy” in the late 80s, a period of unprecedented wealth and optimism, and everything feels supercharged.

While living there I witness the working prototype of a flying car at the Toyota factory (set for release in 1996); see someone win a Harley-Davidson in a game of bingo; and watch Japan buy up the west, from the Rockefeller Center to Columbia Pictures to works of art (most famously Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for a then world-record $40m). And I get spoiled rotten. Powerful businessmen buy me hi-tech gadgets and toys, strangers lavish me with expensive gifts, and at a Starlight VIP party, we are hosted by a member of the yakuza, who, upon hearing I want an ice-cream, brings me a huge tray full of Baskin-Robbins tubs in every flavour.

Starlight Express , which has just broken the record for the most expensive set ever on Broadway, is at the centre of popular taste and culture. Michael Jackson (who kicked off his 1987-89 Bad tour in Tokyo and later worked with Starlight designer John Napier on the 3D sci-fi short film Captain EO ) visits the show more than once. Starlight will return to Japan in 1990 for an even bigger stadium tour, and over the next three years, a sense of optimism will also sweep the globe outside Japan; Nelson Mandela will be released from prison, Germany will be reunified, and the cold war will end with the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, prompting the economist Francis Fukuyama to herald the triumph of western liberal democracy as “the end of history”.

London, 2024

Back here in the future, things have changed. As a child I saw Starlight Express as proof that anything was possible, and seeing my dad – a Black man raised by a single mother in civil rights era New York – shining on stage in Japan, felt like the validation of the central message at the heart of the musical. But those lyrics my dad sang in the title track of Starlight Express – “Needn’t beg the world / To turn around and help you” – escapsulate what the New York Times was getting at in an early 1984 review when it said the show: “Disappointingly unravels into a Thatcherite message of self improvement, finding what you have within you and jolly well pulling yourself together.” Theatre critic Michael Billington went as far as calling the era of Lloyd Webber’s mega musicals in the 80s “ Thatcherism in action ”.

As we have faced austerity, cultural isolationism, global heating, the dangers of AI and major new wars: it’s easy to see what greed, chronic individualism, destruction of unions and skilled working-class jobs and the undermining of multicultural communities led to.

From the vantage point of 2024, the Thatcher and Reagan years look devastatingly shortsighted. Japan itself is still suffering from the outrageous overconfidence of its own late 80s brand of capitalism, in what, since the economic bubble popped in 1991, have come to be known as “ the lost decades ”, a period marked by economic stagnation, an ageing society and troublingly low birthrates. Now, parts of Japan can feel like a projection of the future stuck in the 20th century; the future in stasis. But I mourn a mood rather than a moment, a promise rather than a place, and perhaps the illusions of an era rather than the reality; for a different kind of post-cold war world that never arrived, a parallel universe in which we’re all global citizens afforded dignity, riding high-speed bullet trains or driving affordable, carbon-neutral flying Toyotas through exciting, affluent, glittering metropolises.

It sounds naive now, but when we returned home to Sheffield in 1990, the fact that the postmodern Meadowhall Shopping Centre had suddenly appeared on the grounds of an old steel works suggested to me that perhaps the city was on its way to looking like Tokyo in 20 years. Members of my family who had worked in the steel industry were now getting jobs in the leisure centres and shopping malls that had replaced cutlery manufacture. The feeling was summed up by a poem, Nostalgia by Andrew Gregory, commissioned by the Site Gallery in 1989 to document Sheffield’s change from a city of industry to a city of sport and leisure:

“… it seems wars mills pits / bring people together/ bring out the best in a man… But the war is long over now / And perhaps that other war / The one that sent people / Into dark sheds and darker holes / Is ending too.”

These are the type of working-class aspirations that are often overlooked by comfortably off leftist academics – desires beyond struggle. Recently, I put together After the End of History, a show about working-class photographers for London’s Hayward Gallery where I worked with Ian Anderson from the Sheffield-based company the Designers Republic. He told me an apposite story: “When I moved to Sheffield from Croydon in the 80s, as a working-class lad, the first thing I did was sign up to the Young Socialists. At the first meeting there was this posh young woman going on about ‘what the working class want is international solidarity with the workers of the world’, and I thought to myself: no it isn’t. What they want is what you’ve got, a nice house with a colour TV.”

When it comes to Japan, and the 1980s, I don’t want to stay there, I just want to say I’ve been. Seeing Starlight Express again allowed me to not only think of the contradictions of the moment, but about what kind of coded messages the musical might have in the 21st century.

I mourn for a mood in which it seemed anything was possible, and feel nostalgic for the promise of the way things might have been

From the outside, Starlight’s new home at the Troubadour Wembley Park theatre is a far cry from the elegant, slightly haunted atmosphere I remember from the Apollo Victoria, its art deco home in London for almost 20 years during its first run, and light-years away from Tokyo’s Yoyogi Stadium. But the familiar atmosphere immediately hit me as we walked in, and I saw the faces of my daughters and their friends betraying the exact same feelings I had as a kid: wonder and awe.

That this new cast (diverse as ever) is talented is not in question: the songs are sung well, the acting is good and the story is fun. But if moments of Starlight Express in the 80s spoke of the decade’s excess and overconfidence, the worst of the new London show speaks of our era’s confusion. The real problem is the costume design, which looks as though it is a version of Starlight generated by AI, simultaneously generic yet surreal in the wrong ways, with trains that don’t look like trains and are indistinguishable from one another.

There are flashes of real potential. The introduction of a new character, Hydra, brings the story up to date in all the right ways, but some of the attempts at remaining relevant with young people seem superficial. To pretend Starlight isn’t a 1980s musical, as this new version does, strikes me as a fool’s errand; surely, Lloyd Webber and his team would do better to think of Starlight as a period piece. The show should lean into its heritage as the only one of the “big six” mega musicals of the period – which also includes Cats , Les Mis , Phantom , Chess and Miss Saigon – that is actually set in the 1980s. For his spookily animist costumes and set, the original designer, John Napier, won two Tonys – bring him back! Were Starlight to embrace its roots, it might reassume its rightful position on the West End again, and tap into the kind of audience commanded by other 80s-set shows such as Kate Trefry’s much lauded Stranger Things: The First Shadow , or the Olivier-winning Back to the Future , with which it shares an aura.

Bochum, 2019

Perhaps it is unfair for me to compare this new Starlight Express , which is trying to find its way in tough economic conditions, with what I experienced at the height of the bubble economy in Japan, but I do have a better comparison. In 2019, after delivering a lecture at the University of Münster in Germany, I remembered that in the small Westphalia city of Bochum nearby, a production had been running continuously since I’d last seen it as a child, and was at the time the only place in the world to see the musical. As a jaded adult, I made what I thought of as an ironic trip to see Starlight for the first time in nearly three decades, but was totally unprepared for what came next. I took my seat in the darkness, and as soon as the arpeggios of the overture began, I – someone constantly teased by my family because I never cry – burst into tears, and didn’t stop until the interval. Ugly crying. Not crying, actually, sobbing.

What had touched me, of course, was the feeling of being immediately transported back to the magic of childhood, my parents still together, my dad (who would die only a few months after I saw the Bochum show) at the height of his career, and the excitement of a big bright future ahead. But what really caught me off guard was that the magic was still alive – I hadn’t misremembered the show, it really wasn’t as silly as the synopsis suggests, it was the same spectacle that had let a working-class kid know what creativity was capable of.

I’d seen these young men and women out of costume, but witnessing them turn themselves into superheroes taught me the conjurer’s trick of craft; the spectacle that can be built from ordinary ingredients when talented people work together – what if Starlight was the state, that encouraged such encounters? If the 20th century was full of sham and violence and toxicity, it was also full of wonder and astonishment. I later went back to Bochum with my family to see the show, and it similarly made my mother cry and left my daughters spellbound. A magical piece of my childhood was intact there in this German city, and it was tangible, and I could pass on whatever that magic was to my daughters, who don’t understand German, but inherently understood Starlight’s atmosphere – after all, it’s a story set in a dream and the storyline is secondary to the smoke and lasers, spooky synth arpeggios and disembodied voices.

When we left the new London show, one of my daughter’s friends exclaimed that it was the best thing she had ever seen in her life. For me, however, the trains are still better in Germany.

• Johny Pitts’s ongoing project about 1980s Japan can be found on his Instagram . Starlight Express is at the Troubadour, Wembley, booking until February 2025