Love Never Dies in concert – Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London

Writers: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton

Lyrics: Glenn Slater, Charles Hart

Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber

Director: Shaun Kerrison

Musical Director: Freddie Tapner

If you’re a fan of Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, this concert performance playing for just two days at Theatre Royal Drury Lane will be a genuine treat. There’s a star-studded cast, including Celinde Schoenmaker as Christine Daaé and Norm Lewis as the Phantom, with strong supporting actors, an attractive set and the robust sound of the 27-piece London Musical Theatre Orchestra.

If you’re not a fan, however, or have never seen the show, you’re unlikely to be converted. The most likeable musical numbers deliberately allude to the themes of Phantom but never seem to reach its satisfying heights. The main showstopper is, predictably enough, Love Never Dies. Apart from its sentiment being patently untrue (see below), the melody is pretty but not soaring. Indeed Christine’s songs all seem to have a Julie Andrews-type sweetness, more kindly nanny that bewitching muse. The Phantom’s duets with Christine (Beneath a Moonless Sky and Once Upon a Town) are necessarily sentimental, but it is the orchestral scoring, rather than the melody, which really gives him power.  His duet with Raoul, Devil Take The Hindmost, is properly sparky.

The show doesn’t really deserve the label it once was given, Paint Never Dries, as there’s certainly plenty of action. But the plot is ludicrous. It’s apparently ten years since Christine found it in her heart to pity the Phantom back in Paris. Now she’s arriving in New York, ostensibly to perform for Oscar Hammerstein, but in fact tricked by one Mr Y, who wants her to sing at his Coney Island attraction, Phantasma.

It’s not giving away too much to reveal that the Phantom didn’t actually die at the end of his eponymous role and it is he who is  Mr Y, a tragic figure who continues to cherish his devotion to Christine. Love Never Dies indeed. But there’s the problem that Catherine has been married for ten years to his rival, Raoul. In this marriage, Love has Definitely Died. In order to make way for the true love of the Phantom and Christine, Raoul has to be rendered a hollow character, an alcoholic who has gambled away all their money, and who is curt and unkind to his wife and child, Gustave.  We learn he has been like this from the outset of his marriage, but the notion that this is because he is envious of his wife’s superior singing is unconvincing.

This time around, the plot hangs on whether or not Christine will perform for Mr Y for just one night. There’s a sort of sub-Faustian pact between the Phantom and Raoul about this. The conflation of mercenary motives (Mr Y will pay her a shed-load of money if she does) and fears that the Phantom will once again have her in his clutches just isn’t load-bearing dramatically or psychologically.

Also lacking in credibility is burlesque dancer, Meg, who is forced to undergo a complete character change at the end purely in the interests of plot when she turns from devoted admirer of the Phantom to stop-at-nothing villainess.

There’s a promising glimpse of some sort of complexity in the child prodigy Gustave, admirably performed by Cian Eagle-Service. From a sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy, he falls under the spell of the distinctly creepy circus performers and for a moment briefly reminds us of the eerie Miles in The Turn of the Screw. But this echo, whether intentional or not, comes to nothing, and Miles returns to being a stiff little goody-goody.

The production history of Love Never Dies is notoriously checkered. Since it first opened in London in 2010, it has been dogged by poor reviews and premature closures, followed by rewrites and subsequent openings about which critics have continued to express mixed feelings. The audience last night, however, clearly adored the show, so perhaps after all Love will Never Die.

Reviewed on 21  August 2023