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Saw the show last Thursday (01/07/2010), loved it! The soundtrack gets better and better with every listen, lush and sweeping arrangements...UTTERLY EPIC!!! Top Tracks; 'Till I Hear You Sing', 'Look with your Heart', 'Beneath A Moonless Sky', 'Once Upon Another Time, 'Devil Take The Hindmost. The opening section of the musical is just jaw droppingly amazing and beautiful to behold!!!
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Ok, I saw this show last week, and I wasn't expecting much..except that some said the physical production was quite lovely but the book and score rather mediocre.
Anyhow : I found it quite the opposite..I was rather dissapointed at the random and uninspired sets and the failed chance to do anything with such a fascinating place as Coney island and the 3 big parks there at the beginning of the 20 th century..on the other hand I was very impressed by the lead actor who has a voice that leaves you breathless(what an improvement over Michael Crawford's attempts at vocalising!), also the rest of the cast turns in a fine performance...at least THEY were worth the money! As for the score itself, well, I'm not a A.L.W fan at all, but I always have to admitt to the fact that Phantom was his best show and an inspired piece of theatre at that...a lovely shaped individual piece of, well, ..art I suppose. So the new songs here are what you expect from him, bombastic melodies, rotten lyrics(unless you enjoy a good laugh at the lyricist's expense this kind of floperetta lyrics always bring tears to my eyes...no, not of joy! Ah but for only one Lorenz Hart of Ira Gershwin..oh well..we 've regressed a long way since the golden age of musical theatre...!)but never so bad it hurts and never so dull it puts you in a coma...praise indeed!:-)
Now there is one other thing : WHY? what is the point of this show? Why should anyone want to do it, surely the Phantom was a well rounded story, it had tension, suspense, romance, action, and a heartfelt story of the beauty and the beast. Now what do we have here in Love never dies : hardly any tension, the story is predictable from the first ten minutes, no action(unless you count the last 20 minutes), characters that act in not very intelligible ways, motivations that are very strange, and an ending that is so commonplace it reminds you of a movie of the week rather than grand opera...
people around me in the theatre reacted mostly in a lacklustre way, one comment being repeated several times : "the one thing this show does is that it makes you want to go see phantom again.." ..and in fact that's how the original Phantom is now advertised in the London subway : " come and see the BRILLIANT original"...implying the only so-so quality of the sequel I suppose...So in the end of nothing else I guess this show works as a..really usefull... marketing tool to boost the sales of "the Phantom of the opera" ? :-)
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