A number of people I know have professed boredom with the prevailing critical hostility toward Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s interesting to me that none of the people who claim to be tired of reading negative reviews of “Aspects of Love” have actually seen it. In fact, I don’t think it would be possible for anyone who had seen “Aspects of Love” to tire of reading negative reviews of it.
Most musicals are about whether or not people will end up together. The most sophisticated ones—like “Show Boat” or “Gypsy”—use this convention to explore events of greater moment. But the 1955 novel, by David Garnett, on which Lloyd Webber has based his latest extravaganza (at the Broadhurst) is about whether or not people will have sex with each other: Will Alex (Michael Ball), a young Englishmen, get it on with Rose (Ann Crumb), a French actress he has met in Montpellier between school and military service? And once Alex has spirited Rose off to his uncle’s villa in Pau for a dirty fortnight will he be able to keep her there, or will Rose take a fancy to Uncle George (Kevin Colson) and get it on with him? And when she has become George’s long-term mistress will she still be up for sex with Alex when he comes home on leave? Out of such questions Lloyd Webber tries to wring high drama, mostly by means of the sudden and vigorous crescendo. Uncle George turns out to have an Italian mistress (Kathleen Rowe McAllen), with whom Rose also has a brief fling in Act I; and Act II is concerned mainly with whether or not Alex will pursue an affair with Jenny, George and Rose’s teenage daughter (played in prepubescent and pubescent versions by Deanna and Danielle Du Clos, respectively). The extraordinary thing about all this is that we are at no point told (or asked to take an interest in) anything about any of these people other than whether or not they have had or will have sexual intercourse with each other.
“Aspects of Love” has been got up by its director, Trevor Nunn, to look like “Les Misérables.” In fact, it is “Les Misérables,” Nunn’s last Broadway success), rather than “Phantom of the Opera” (Lloyd Webber’s), that “Aspects” most resembles, even though Nunn called on Maria Bjornson, of “Phantom,” to design it. “Aspect of Love” is through-sung (i.e. nobody just talks); it carries characters across fairly vast expanses of time and space (not without the help of treadmills) and its Playbill is designed with libretto-like complexity. Characters and song titles are listed by topographical categories (“AT THE FAIRGROUNDS” or “IN VENICE”) or chronological notations (“Two years pass…” or “Thirteen years later…”).
Of course, all these things were true of “Les Misérables,” too. But “Les Misérables” was a work about which it was possible to have mixed feelings. Your head told you to sneer at the predictable rhymes and the paint-by-number dramaturgy and (most of all) the mind-boggling hypocrisy of the whole thing, and you knew that it was garbage, really—a Classic Comics version of great literature. But on some level it moved you—because of the clever staging and set design, or the music, or this or that great song or production number—and when the hype had died down it was possible to develop a love-hate relationship with the show. “Aspects of Love,” which offers a cheapened version of the central image in “Les Misérables”—a young man and a silver-haired gentleman vying for the spiritual possession of a little girl—has no great staging, no great numbers, and no visual imagery. It has only predictable rhymes (the lyrics are by Don Black and Charles Hart), charmless performances, and a lot of characters standing around singing the equivalent of “Please pass the butter” in recitative.
A friend of mine who saw “Aspects of Love” in London has suggested that it is the perfect source material for Andrew Lloyd Webber—that a collaboration between the great schlock composer and this minor member of the Bloomsbury set represents a match made in Heaven. I don’t think so. I think Gaston Leroux’s turn-of-the-century thriller was the perfect material for Lloyd Webber, because of what the nineteenth-century consciousness offers to the popular imagination: you could bring with you into the theater images and ideas that “Phantom of the Opera” didn’t provide. Garnett’s novel, which is concerned with only slightly more than whether or not people will have sex with each other—it’s also about what they eat before and after—is itself pretty frail. Its primary appeal lies in its grasp of the authentic vocabulary of Mediterranean cuisine (“zabaglione,” “piperade”); reading it, you get the feeling that if Garnett had been born a decade or two later he would have written for the style page. But the novel is inoffensive. When you try to make its trivial concerns palpable, however, with elaborate, elegant sets and music that swells and heaves, what you get is something so empty that it implodes on itself—a sort of apotheosis of vulgarity. That “Aspects of Love” seems such a gesture of desperation is almost enough to make you worry for Lloyd Webber—almost, but not quite. At forty-two, he has a net worth that’s been estimated at two hundred and forty million dollars. You can buy in Lloyd Webber; he’s converted himself into a public company—like the Duke of Plaza Toro. He is, in short, a man who has everything except real talent.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 23, 1990