No, it isn’t ‘Bwana Devil’

Unlike many a more recent stage musical, “Starlight Express” didn’t spring from the movies. But Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1984 show wouldn’t be on tour if its creators had not solved a logistical problem with an old movie gimmick: the 3-D film.

The show, which runs Tuesday through Feb. 8 at the Pantages Theatre, has a cast on roller skates impersonating railroad trains competing in a big race. In its original London incarnation (which played for nearly 18 years) and on Broadway during the late ‘80s, the show hunkered down. Theaters were expensively outfitted with ramps, tracks and bridges that brought the racers over and through the audience. But for a tour designed to play a week or two at each stop, the task of taking out seats and building a skate-park in the house would have been daunting, and cost-prohibitive.

John Napier, designer of the original show, hit on the idea of a 3-D film as a way to suggest racing that explodes into the crowd. His son, Julian, shot the sequences in Wales. As rock music pounds out, skaters shove and pummel each other while careering through confined, tunnel-like spaces. Their crashes and spills send debris flying toward the audience in 3-D illusion.

“It’s something new, like musical theater meets MTV,” says Louanne Madorma-Williams, the traveling resident director, who is responsible for seeing that the effects come together each night. The challenge, she said, is to weave the live action seamlessly around the screened races.

In a nightly ritual, ushers either pre-stuff cardboard 3-D glasses, dubbed “safety goggles,” into each program, or hand them out as theatergoers enter. Blaring, prerecorded warnings sound for each of the three races, reminding onlookers to don the glasses for sequences that last about 2 1/2 minutes each. More than a million pairs will be used on tour, according to the producer, Troika Entertainment.

“The tour wouldn’t exist if you didn’t have the film,” Madorma-Williams says. “But it would be very dangerous to think we could replace actors with film. It’s an extra additive, not a replacement.”

-- Mike Boehm