Lukewarm reviews for Phantom sequel (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Lukewarm reviews for Phantom sequel

10:52am Wednesday 10th March 2010 in

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Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies has received lukewarm reviews, with some critics doubtful the long-awaited sequel to The Phantom Of The Opera will prove as successful as the original.

Writing in The Daily Mail, Quentin Letts declared: "A hit? Not quite."

Charles Spencer, in The Daily Telegraph, described the musical as "Lloyd Webber's finest show since the original Phantom".

But, given the popularity of recent musical comedies such as Hairspray, Sister Act and Legally Blonde, he wondered whether audiences would fork out for "two-and-a-half hours of dark Gothic imaginings, seething passion, and in the final scene, sudden, violent death".

Letts writes off the musical's opening as "stodgy", complaining it did not really "smoke into life" until 20 minutes in - and even then it "sputters for a while". He said the first scene was memorable only for its "expensive backdrop" of New York's Coney Island with its white-knuckle fairground rides, dancing girls and a "horror-movie-style lair for the Phantom".

He went on: "The night ends with a death scene so long that it may only reignite the euthanasia debate."

Letts also pointed to a "lack of solid story-telling" - a sentiment echoed by other critics.

Michael Billington in The Guardian said: "What the show lacks, in a nutshell, is narrative tension", while Benedict Nightingale, in The Times, asked: "So where's the tension in Ben Elton and Lloyd Webber's book?"

Awarding the show three out of five, Billington wrote: "The score is one of the composer's most seductive. Bob Crowley's design and Jack O'Brien's direction have a beautiful kaleidoscopic fluidity."

However, Nightingale, who gave the musical two out of five, said the title song had "pretty clunky" lyrics.