Gothic caricatures

Love Never Dies
Adelphi, booking to October

The Fever Chart
Trafalgar Studio 2, booking to 3 April

Love Never Dies has been bugging Andrew Lloyd Webber since 1990. He felt that the Phantom of the Opera needed a sequel and he’s been working on it for roughly three times as long as it took Tolstoy to write War and Peace. The script assumes no knowledge of the earlier show. Christine, an unhappily married French diva, is offered a singing contract by a mysterious maestro who runs a theatre in Coney Island. She arrives with her husband and son and discovers that the maestro is none other than the obsessed Phantom himself. The ensuing love triangle is marred by the bizarre psychological distortions of the characters.

Christine is a whirlwind of professional ambition and romantic frustration. Her husband is a bankrupt aristocratic drunk with beautiful suits and an ugly temper, and the Phantom is a transatlantic stalker with a half-formed cranium. Wisely, he sports a Samsonite skull-panel which keeps his brain from oozing down the side of his face. Sometimes he takes it off to show us his spag-bol cerebellum. These three Gothic caricatures circle each other for an hour or so until a surprise revelation about Christine’s son sends the story lurching in a fresh direction. But the good news turns out to be bad news for the drama as it removes any obstacle to the union of Christine and her phrenologically challenged suitor. So a final deadly surprise is introduced involving a stray bullet, a lot of stage ketchup and a swooping aria belted out at top volume by a performer bleeding to death on the floorboards.

The botched storyline is probably the show’s worst feature.