LOVE NEVER DIES: In Preview And On Opening

I've seen Love Never Dies twice now and I'm still not sure what I make of it. So I'll attempt to unravel my thoughts here and perhaps you can help me. Warning - plot spoilers abound.

First of all, what's good about it is very, very good. The cast are uniformly amazing; Ramin Karimloo's voice always fits better with the more rock numbers (I kept hearing echoes of a Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar in there) but his range and tone are gorgeous, and he has great chemistry with Sierra Boggess, in her West End debut as Christine. Summer Strallen has been given more to work with as Meg since the second preview, and as such she starts to shine throughout the second act.

The best parts of the score are excellent. I've found myself humming snippets of several songs randomly over the past fortnight - always a good marker of memorable tunes. Even the weaker, or perhaps more correctly jarring, numbers have a bizarre appeal to them (I've found myself bellowing, "TEEEEEEN YEEEEEEEEEEEARS OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD!" to my friends who've seen the show too). The orchestrations too are lush and lovely, particularly when there's a nod to a melody from the original Phantom Of The Opera.

The changes that have been made since previews, by and large, make it a more coherent piece. Christine isn't standing around for ages before anyone notices her getting off the boat; the Phantom suddenly replaces the bartender, rather than being there from the start of the scene trying to conceal his face from the audience; and that notoriously dragging ending has been pared down substantially.

When Love Never Dies was first mooted, I had several reservations about the characterisations, but strangely they don't seem to matter here. I can well believe that Meg's  teenage envy of her more lauded best friend could turn into something darker; the naive, suggestible, slightly narcissistic Christine could continue to dither between her beloved Raoul and the seductive, powerful, charismatic man who gave her a voice (though the idea that she would commit infidelity the night before her wedding is rather extreme); and most conceivably, if you'll forgive the pun, if Raoul does know or suspect that Gustave is not his son (as is suggested by his constant addressing of him as "the boy") and if he's spent the past decade overshadowed by his wife, with his total lack of skills apart from a boundless supply of cash, then no wonder he's into drinking and risk-taking now.

Which leads me to the one difficult and inconsistent character - the Phantom himself, who's mutated from a terrifying psychopathic genius to a reclusive impresario who's just waiting to be given the opportunity to test out his paternal skills - and the problems with the ways in which the characterisations are worded.

Don't get me wrong, I think the actors do brilliantly to convey their messages with the material they've got - but the book and lyrics are invariably clunky. Terribly, jaw-droppingly, teeth-grindingly cringingly so. My personal nadir is the Phantom and Christine's mutual recollection of their night of saucy shenanigans, conveyed in child-friendly words of one syllable, as you'd expect in a family show, and it's to Karimloo and Boggess's credit that they managed to stave off the audience's laughter. I also have a particular bugbear about the idea that Christine would (presumably) sleep with two men in two days and be sure about the resultant child's paternity...unless Raoul has some kind of infertility issue that isn't explained. And as for the most horrendous Chekhov's gun I've ever seen in a musical...well, this is the kind of presentation that gives our wonderful art-form a bad name for unsubtlety.

Which brings me to that denouement. It has all the ingredients for incredible drama - the kidnap, the most obvious death weapon since Ernie's famous firearm in Too Close To The Sun, the accidental shot, the manslaughter. And yet it's tediously overdrawn and strangely unmoving. Partly that's the fault of the dialogue and lyrics (again, there's a murmur of laughter at the Phantom's final line to Meg, when there should be gasps of horror, and Christine's ability to sing a high B flat with her dying breaths is impressive), and partly that's the fault of the direction - the over-exaggerated arm-drop from the expiring Christine, for example.

When the curtain fell during previews, there were two full-cast bows, and that was it. Now it's opened, the leads and featured ensemble get individual acclaim - well-deserved, maybe, but sneakily it allows the team to argue that the show is getting a standing ovation every night, which it's not; it's all entirely due to the performances. With a weaker cast, this would most certainly flop. As it is, I'm veering towards a "not bad - but could certainly have done better".

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