Picture: Louise Morris
Aspects of Love is booking at the Lyric Theatre, London until 11 November 2023.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Shortly before his 60th birthday last year, Michael Ball had a brainwave: while too old to reprise the role of young buck Alex in Aspects of Love, the show which 34 years earlier had earned him a huge pop chart hit with the instantly hummable ‘Love Changes Everything’, he did fancy taking a crack at Alex’s bohemian, shady Uncle George.
How about a West End revival? He floated the idea past producer Nica Burns, and the original creative team of Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricists Don Black and Charles Hart. They all came on board, the Baron even tweaking it so that Ball, his big ticket-seller, could reprise the showstopper that made him a worldwide star in his mid-20s.
It is the love triangle between 18-year-old Alex, the glamorous five-years-older actress Rose he’s besotted with, and his sexually still-energetic goat of an uncle – Alex naively takes her to George’s country pile to show off his conquest – that’s at the nub of this bed-hopping fun in all its permutations and combinations of love and, ooh-la-la (it’s in France).
It gets spicier still when George’s tempestuous Italian mistress Giulietta (opera crossover diva Danielle de Niese, magnificent) also takes a shine to Rose (Laura Pitt-Pulford, vocally sensational throughout, particularly in her gut-wrenching closing number ‘Anything But Lonely’) and plants a long, lingering kiss on her lips.
And when the narrative moves on 12 years, there’s a worrying cradle-snatching scene when Alex, now greying and in his mid-30s, takes an unhealthy interest in Rose’s daughter Jenny (Anna Unwin at 18 and Millie Gubby as her schoolgirl self in a role shared with Indiana Ashworth and Katie Mitton for the six-month run).
Did anyone else feel slightly queasy when Jamie Bogyo, as the now very mature Alex, sings ‘The First Man You Remember’? Having taken on Ball’s old 1989 part Boygo risks comparison, even though the best-known song is no longer his to sing, but he does himself proud. We shall continue to hear more from him.
Ball himself, these days almost showbiz royalty, is at the top of his his game on the singing front and funny with it. There’s a priceless punchline at the end of the scene where Alex (spoiler alert) shoots and wounds Rose. In so doing he disturbs one of George’s works of art on the wall. “My only genuine Matisse,” he wails, not remotely interested in Rose’s plight.
People say ‘Love Changes Everything’ is the only good song in the show but this revival says otherwise, the sweet, romantic early Alex-Rose duet ‘Seeing is Believing’, ‘Other Pleasures’ with Ball and ‘Anything But Lonely’ from the flawless Pitt-Pulford are three more that work beautifully. And musical director Cat Beveridge’s orchestra, high up above the stage gives full value to a ravishing, sumptuous score.
The early press notices about director Jonathan Kent’s luxurious revival have been generally pretty sniffy. Even legendary opera designer John Macfarlane’s sets and use of video have not thrilled everybody. And while agreeing that any script where the audience laughs during a death scene is badly flawed, and admitting that the whole thing is curiously uninvolving despite the cast’s best efforts, there are so many positives in the incredible all-round quality of the singing, the silky orchestration and the unquantifiable asset that is M Ball OBE to compensate.
It’s not Lloyd Webber’s greatest by a long way – at the time it suffered by comparison with its immediate blockbuster predecessor The Phantom of the Opera – but it’s far more watchable than some of the mundane stuff he’s thrown at us in the past decade, especially the bad, bad, bad Cinderella.
Sitting in the remote Grand Circle for the first time in years, my fears that much of the joy might be lost proved groundless. Thanks to the excellent acoustics, every word projected up there with bell-like clarity… and it all sounded great.
Jeremy Chapman
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