Ruth Leon Pocket Review: Aspects of Love – Lyric Theatre

The truth is, David Garnett’s  1955 novella was never a very good idea on which to base a multi-million dollar musical. An enormous amount of talent has been expended to prove this statement wrong.

This assymetrical love story about an aging actress, an 18-year old boy, an elderly roue, a mad Italian artist and a little girl, while a fun read, is too episodic to work on stage. It jumps from character to character, from crisis to crisis, from crush to infatuation, from incident to incident, in movie-like ‘jump cuts’.  To help us get from person to person and from scene to too-short scene, there are screens lurching from one side of the stage to the other, with pictures to tell us where we are. The lyrics have to do a lot of work and almost every line in every song is overweighted with facts so that you don’t lose track of each character and what’s happened to them since we last saw them.

The music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart, the director is Jonathan Kent. Michael Ball sings the show’s two best songs beautifully even though it’s hard to believe in him as an elderly roué adored by all the women in his life. He played the young man in the first production of this show, in 1989, now he’s the young man’s uncle. Hmmm.

​More an operetta than a musical, it has been correctly cast with fine singers. The opera singer Danielle de Niese  has even deserted her home opera house of Glyndebourne for a chance to be in this show.

The show seems to want to say something serious about human interaction without sexual jealousy and how “Love Changes Everything”, in the words of the show’s signature song, but the plot has some unsavoury elements concerning the young girl and we end up not caring about any of these feckless people, living a life unfettered to anything in real life.

Aspects of Love has already had a West End run, a Broadway run, and here it is again, back in the West End as though to insist that it really is a good idea after all.

Read more