‘STARLIGHT’ OFF-TRACK IN N.Y.

“Starlight Express” didn’t bowl over the press. Broadway’s new $8-million roller-skate musical drew largely negative reviews, even from the critics who tried to give it its due.

“The evening frequently makes your heart beat faster, no doubt about it,” wrote David Richards of the Washington Post. “But the same can be said of a roller coaster.”

Clive Barnes of the New York Post was also impressed by the show’s “technical wizardry.” But Barnes found Trevor Nunn’s production “so mechanized that it turns out to be totally uninvolving.”

Most of the critics weren’t at all impressed. Howard Kissell of the Daily News thought the evening “as exciting as watching someone else climb the Matterhorn at Disneyland”; Frank Rich of the New York Times found the show noisy, confused, sexist and “Orwellian.”

Variety agreed: “An inflated, blaring spectacle which tries to substitute size for entertainment . . . Just because a show’s characters are anthropomorphized railway trains doesn’t absolve the authors of such legit fundamentals as motivation and character development . . . this ‘Starlight’ skimps the human elements to a fatal degree.”

Variety also guessed that the show wouldn’t last too long after its $5-million advance sale ran out. But that will take some time. Tickets are on sale through next Jan. 8. “Starlight Express” could make a run for it.

P.S. The producers did have one critic in their corner. Wrote Morna Murphy-Martell in the Hollywood Reporter: “The story may be simple, even simplistic, but the magic of the show is its ability to lift us into our own childhood fantasy.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK--Jackie Taylor, starring in the Black Ensemble production of “Streetcar Named Desire” in Chicago: “I never thought of Blanche Dubois as being black or white, just tragic.”