Aside from the rightful ascension of Laura Pitt-Pulford to West End main girl, there’s little else to commend the misguided revival of Aspects of Love on the Lyric Theatre
“Do you still like omelettes?”
Andrew Lloyd Webber clearly has a chokehold over UK theatre producers, regardless of his behaviour in direction of his personal corporations on both facet of the Atlantic. And but we’re simply as culpable as viewers members who maintain turning up, his work so intently entwined with a wider cultural understanding of what musical theatre is, or fairly was. For higher or worse, this revival of 1989’s Aspects of Love, with lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart, presents the chance to see all of that in motion.
Based on a novella by David Garnett, the storyline follows the romantic entanglements over 20 years, of a an actress, a younger soldier, his uncle, the uncle’s mistress and, most horrifyingly of all, the daughter of the actress and the uncle. In each the supply and the unique, Jenny (the daughter) was 15 on the level at which she was declaring love for the cousin who she has grown up with (who can also be her mom’s former lover lest we neglect), however now she’s 18, so every thing is A-OK with this storyline now…
This sort of tinkering can also be obvious musically, as Michael Ball – who performed the soldier in 1989 however now takes on the uncle – as soon as once more will get to sing the breakout music ‘Love Changes Everything’ (so ubitiquous after I was a child…). It’s a well-liked selection within the auditorium to make sure but it surely’s a cold-eyed inventive resolution that smacks of opportunism and salving massive egos. On prime of that, that is arguably one in every of ALW’s weakest scores, too reliant on too few motifs to hold us by a full size musical.
At the top of the manufacturing, director Jonathan Kent doesn’t supply sufficient to justify the revival of one thing with this a lot rejigging. A modish try at staging has a sliding video panel to help within the a number of shifts in location, however the inventory footage is shockingly generic, so very a lot at odds with the masterfully painted flats (from designer John MacFarlane) that ultimately seem. A revolve is used uncertainly and inconsistently. Everything feels simply sadly inconsequential.
The fireworks that come are within the moments the place the arduous endeavour of the performers breaks by. Ball is okay sufficient if somewhat near self-satisfied, Jamie Boygo is nice sufficient because the soldier however Danielle de Niese is superb within the sorely underwritten a part of the mistress (they can provide Michael Ball the ‘best’ music however they’ll’t give her one other…?!). And Laura Pitt-Pulford ascends to the function of West End main girl with all of the star high quality she has spent years cultivating, a efficiency of true musical and dramatic depth that deserves higher environment.
The future of recent British musical theatre is actually brilliant (get to Southwark Playhouse now! or the Fortune or on the ready checklist for this) but it surely isn’t to be discovered right here, in a manufacturing of a horribly dated musical that panders to its 60-something star and its 70-something composer and asks us to just accept its making gentle of grooming. This can’t be the way in which ahead and but producers, creatives and audiences carry on trundling by the door. See you in a number of months to do it once more for Sunset Boulevard…