Gil Hates Everything

I honestly didn’t expect this to be a show featuring plainly gay trains. My sister often remarks, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, said the trucks.” I’m not sure she’s ever seen this, but it could easily be a (short) review.

The strangest thing about this show is the complete clash of tone between the apparent sexual content and the idea that this is supposed to be a kid’s trainset come to life and running races. Which is of course awesome: every kid with model cars or trains or whatever ascribes personalities to them, and after all this show was originally intended as a version of the Thomas The Tank Engine books. (I hadn’t realized that the whole “Really Useful Company” comes from the books, but of course it does… “Really Useful Engines”, etc.)

There’s a whole bunch of interesting and sometimes bizarre trivia associated with this show; the most interesting of which in musical theatre terms is that David Yazbek contributed to rewrites for the US edition of the show. If you grew up in England and liking trains, the wiki page for this show is a goldmine of “oh yeah!” references.

This show features the most relentless extended metaphor of trains-as-sex; pumping engines, coupling, AC/DC, all of this is obviously very sexual – if you’re post-puberty. But then it’s coupled to a sub-juvenile show and supposedly inspired by books for six-year-olds. I’m vaguely creeped out, to be honest. I’m not sure I’d have wanted my model trains to be shagging all the time, but no doubt I was in a minority. I weep for the loss of the innocence which this show apparently ejaculates all over. Oh well. Let’s check out the soundtrack…

Musically, it’s mostly a bunch of disco songs, and I won’t deny that they have some energy to them. I’m trying to imagine the effect of dayglo rollerskaters bombing around the theatre throwing shapes and singing this stuff, and I expect it’s pretty impressive if you buy into it. But I also think you’d have to be free of a certain adult cynicism to do that. I mean, I should probably deny that I ever liked “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper” and Sheila B. Devotion’s “Spacer”, but they were a consequence of the in-turn-possibly-not-cool crush I had on Jan Chappell. (Mmmmm… Cally… I still idly daydream about Cally. Spooky guerilla chick-chic!) What I’m saying is, I think you’d need to see “Starlight Express” early in your life, if at all. It’s like reading “Catcher In The Rye”, or, as io9.com pointed out recently, “Stranger In A Strange Land”: it opens your eyes, and then when you’re a little older you feel embarrassed that you needed it so badly. And yet you did.

The soundtrack goes badly wrong when it deviates from the disco template, mind you. A bit of a scattershot approach to styles – the same high school musical kitchen-sink vibe that saturates “Joseph” – starts to kick in as we approach the end of the first act, and the traditional-sounding ALW songs such as “There’s Me” sound awful – and worse, awfully out of place. I guess “U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D.” is a play on “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.”, but it’s a country song, so it must die, funny or otherwise.

Also, outrage: “Call Me Rusty” is melodically a total theft from Rat Pack standard “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me”. Good old ALW, never writing a new melody if he can recycle one from earlier in the song, the show, his career, or music history in general…

Lyrically it’s often ropey; Richard Stilgoe wrote down to order for this one. A fair few of the songs are only there so that people can do things on stage without having to be silent. (“Mime: The Musical”. Oh, it has to be done now I’ve thought of it.) On the plus side, “Poppa’s Blues” is very funny, and “C.B.” is quite disturbing, as this particular boxcar claims to have caused all the major train crashes in recent history. (If you think back on it, a lot of the incidents in the Thomas books were worrying; the evil trucks, for example, deliberately screwing up any engine they didn’t like. Those pesky lower classes!) “One Rock’n’Roll Too Many” treads the same territory as “Poppa’s Blues”, but is still alright. Richard Stilgoe was a very funny writer when he wanted to be, and was well-known in England for writing and performing a comedy song each week for the end of BBC1’s Friday evening current affairs programme at the time. (His mileage on these varied, but it was excellent publicity.) So it’s a bit irritating that he provides lyrics which could best be described as “ambient” for many of the songs here. Then again, with the cast living in the omnipresent shadow of death by rollerskate pileup, I suppose asking them to also remember six hundred words per song would have been unfair.

A couple of songs into Act Two and I was actively thinking “how much more of this is there going to be?” and the distressing answer was “Ten more numbers, Gil, sorry”. I just about made it through, but god, there’s some second act sagging here and no mistake. And the title song makes me want to hammer nails into my ears, so it’s great that I hear it more than once. By the time I reached “The Light At The End Of The Tunnel” I was plenty tired of the show, which makes me suspect still further that this is not a soundtrack designed to be listened to in isolation.

As usual, Webber manages to provide one striking moment of music, although it’s less (really) useful than in “Phantom”: it’s the pseudo-siren keyboards which underlie every appearance from “Control” (the child). It might only be twenty seconds of circular keyboards, but it’s thrilling, urgent, and absolutely perfect for the job, and I was really glad it cropped up whenever it did.

I’m torn… I’d like to like a show about trains, in the same way that I’m sure a lot of people wanted to like a movie called “Cars” but didn’t because it felt wrong. Aside from the problem of its material being mostly crap, I’m not sure I would have wanted to see this specific show. But what do I know, I’m 40; maybe at age 10 it would have been mindblowing, and I wouldn’t have been so bent out of shape by it feeling weird. With that in mind, Random Panda awards this a sliding mark on the bamboo scale; there’s absolutely no point watching (or listening) to it if you’re over 30, and if by some chance you’re under ten years old and reading Gil Hates Musicals, then first, I’d like to say “Fuck” one more time, and then you should maybe go ask your parents if you can go see this. But then again, if you want a sparky sci-fi spectacle about vehicle racing, you should watch the “Speed Racer” movie instead, and it won’t be quite as embarrassing when your friends ask what you did on Saturday night, kid.

I can’t persuade myself to link up anything from this show, but to soften the blow, here for my embarrassment is Sheila B. Devotion singing “Spacer” – and – I’ll take any excuse – a picture of the awesome Jan Chappell, aka Cally from “Blake’s 7”.

(originally posted 2009)