Standard Digital Edition

Nobody can love revival of this messy, silly show

Nick Curtis

Aspects of Love

Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue ★★✩✩✩

IT’S hard to see why Andrew Lloyd Webber thought this creepy and downright silly chamber musical was a good idea in 1989, let alone for revival now. A story of postwar bohemians engaged in crossgeneration romances within their own family and social circle, its characters are thin and dislikeable, the plot preposterous. Supposedly a celebration of love in all its forms, it ends up tarnishing even paternal affection with “ick”.

The score, weaving endlessly around the big numbers Love Changes Everything and Seeing is Believing, is lushly romantic, and Jonathan Kent’s production is both briskly efficient and stylish. The orchestrations are impressive, as are the voices, with Michael Ball playing the old rival to the young lover he played in the original, and belting out one big, crowd-pleasing, front-of-stage top note. But just when you think you are enjoying it, a new lapse into buttock-clenching bad taste pulls you back.

In 1947, older actress Rose (Laura Pitt-Pulford, silvery) impulsively runs off from Paris with besotted teenage fan Alex (Jamie Bogyo, overemoting) to his uncle George’s villa in Pau. Fruity roue George (Ball) turns up and… guess what happens?

Rose wavers between the two, and years go by, while George’s Venetian sculptress lover Giulietta (Danielle de Niese, exercising her operatic lungs) seems happy to shag or snog just about everyone involved. Things get really complicated when Jenny (Anna Unwin), the teenage daughter of George and Rose, falls for Alex. I mean, ewwww. The main characters go from screaming jealousy to indulgent indifference in a heartbeat. The height of absurdity comes when Alex shoots Rose, then he and George argue amiably in song who she’d be better off with. Utterly unsexy, this is a story about egotism rather than passion.

It’s beautifully designed by John Macfarlane, with watercolour backdrops and projection screens that swipe one scene off the stage before the next. Ball’s fanbase will be delighted to see him twinkle and decorously emote in an undemanding role.

But really, the score and the daft narrative aren’t substantial enough to make us care about these smug, silly people and their lazy, messy, borderline-incestuous liaisons. “Love makes fools of everyone,” booms Ball’s George. Well, quite.

⬤ To November 11, aspectsoflove.com

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2023-05-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-05-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://eveningstandard.pressreader.com/article/281797108367843

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