‘Starlight’ on a Fast Track to L.A. : Theater: Skating high-tech ground, the huge touring musical blazes into the Pantages on Thursday. Its 24 cast members are supported by a 50-ton set.

Every month, Robert Nolan, company manager of “Starlight Express,” writes a check for $200 worth of condoms.

True, Nolan is responsible for the 77-person cast and crew of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mammoth touring musical, which skates into the Pantages Theatre Thursday through April 1 (and then on to the Orange County Performing Arts Center April 4-16).

But it is not safe sex that the non-lubricated Trojans are ordered to ensure, but safe sound. Nolan, now touring in Vancouver, has yet to find anything that works better than condoms to protect the company’s microphones from the sweat of its hard-skating performers.

In a show where technology is the star, what machinery needs, machinery gets.

And no human in his company needs anywhere near the pampering of the 50-ton production, with its 44-foot skating ramp, 22 miles of fiber optics, 1,350 lights, two laser beams and the 75 skates that are repaired nightly after being used by a 24-person cast.

His 10, 48-foot tractor trailers include a wardrobe department that looks like a carpentry shop, complete with soldering iron to attach the sequins on the metal costumes.

Also along for the ride are three washing machines and 10 giant fans for the costumes too large to fit into the two dryers.

At a capitalized cost of $5 million, “Starlight Express” is the most expensive touring show ever. The national press representative for the show, Philip Minges, calculates that even selling at 85%-90% capacity (as they have since the tour started Nov. 7 in Cincinnati), it will take a year, give or take a few months, to break even.

It helps that the show is booked at least that long, through the end of 1990.

The ticket prices help too. At a range of $18-$47.50, it will be the second highest-priced show in Los Angeles, right after that other ever-popular Lloyd Webber musical “Phantom of the Opera,” at the Ahmanson Theatre, which is ticketed at $32.50-$50.

In contrast, Ken Hill’s modest “Phantom of the Opera,” which toured Los Angeles in November, was capitalized at $1 million and took just eight weeks to make back its money on the road, with a ticket range of $30-$39.50.

So where does all that money and high-tech equipment go in “Starlight Express”? It goes to tell a big, flashy story about The Little Engine That Could.

An old steam engine called Poppa believes in the power of steam and encourages a young engine named Rusty to race against Greaseball, a diesel, and Electra, an electric train.

Does Rusty take the challenge? You betcha. And as he races for the championship, he races for the heart of a cute little observation car named Pearl who has wandering wheels for his competitors.

The idea seemed a bit simple to many critics, but crowds flocked to the Broadway production, which ran from 1987-89, and to the tour, which was just held over two weeks in Seattle and has already broken even in Los Angeles in advance sales.

After all, even the skeptics have to concede that there is nothing simple about the execution.

The trains are all played by skaters wearing 35-pound costumes, helmets lit by concealed battery packs and 22 wireless microphones, about the size of a cigarette pack, tucked inside the condoms Nolan has to buy for every performance.

The terrain is a complicated set of tracks that extend 44 feet from the front of the stage over the orchestra pit and into the audience. In the course of two hours and 10 minutes, they sing and skate/dance, clashing and crashing through four cross-country races.

It took close to a year for the management team to figure out how to package the Broadway show for a tour. The key problem was the three-story set used for the cross-country races.

How could a set that had taken six months to build in the Gershwin Theatre be transformed into a set that could load and unload in a day?

It couldn’t. Ultimately, the choice was made to go with a single-level set and splice live racing on stage with film clips of racing on other levels. The skaters start their race, the back of the set flips over to a movie screen in which the race continues on film and then finishes live.

Footage of the skaters in the touring show was shot in five days at Camera Mart in New York. The space was a mere 100 by 80 feet, but it was designed to show the skaters soaring through cornfields and cities from dawn to afternoon to twilight to night, uphill and downhill from one end of the United States to the other.

Perry Cline, the production supervisor for “Starlight Express,” was one of the problem solvers.

“We had a meeting in February of ’89 in London with John Napier, the designer, (director) Trevor Nunn, the producers and myself,” Cline recalled. “We wanted to see what we could do to make those races work. We thought the only way was to make it more like a rock concert or a sporting event where they use instant replay.”

Cline said the idea turned out to have advantages over the all-live racing sequences that sometimes left audiences confused.

“It’s helped the production in that it keeps the relationships of the characters and who’s going after whom much more clear,” said Cline. “We thought audiences would go, ‘Oh no,’ on the fourth race, but they loved it. It was a real surprise to us.”

The three-tiered “Starlight Express” is now only playing two places in the world--in London, where it has been running at the Victoria Apollo since 1984, and in West Germany, since 1988. In England, the races reflect English boundaries, in West Germany, they reflect West German boundaries.

Will the West German boundaries be altered if West and East Germany are reunited? No one from the Really Useful Theatre Company, which produces the show, was available for a comment on that.

For Nolan, who has been touring “Starlight Express” for three months now, just making sure the races keep going from one end of America to another on one level is enough to think about.

“We have to always be prepared for the unexpected,” he said. Early on a piece of scenery called the starting gate, that is programmed by computer, broke down and he had to fly in the original programmer to fix it. His crew recently had to extend its Seattle stage to an adjoining parking lot, so the skaters would have space to change between scenes.

Then there was the time in St. Louis when one of the skaters fell into the audience (no one was hurt and one of the critics reviewing that night thought it was part of the show).

But Nolan isn’t complaining.

“I love my job,” he said. “I thought a lot more would happen out of the ordinary than actually did. Maybe things didn’t happen because I thought they would.”