Review: Aspects of Love

● There's a Woody Allen gag, in Love and Death I think, in which Allen lists various aspects of love. "There's love between a man and a woman, love between mother and son. And two women, let's not forget my favourite..."

The parental kind here is with a daughter not a son, but all the above forms and more are present in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1989 musical. Based on David Garnett's romantic novel, the setting is post-war France where Alex falls for Rose and then Rose falls first for Alex, then Alex's Uncle George and he with her. Only then do we arrive at Allen's favourite, when Rose and George's mistress Giulietta fall for each other.

But this pared down, powerfully sung production revived by the show's original director, Trevor Nunn, takes it all and itself so seriously that it is nearly the end of the second act before we feel a fraction of the passions being felt onstage.

Don Black and Charle's Hart's lyrics serve as sung rhyming couplets when not part of a song, the most famous of which, Love Changes Everything, is not the best.

The snobbish suggestion is that so profound are this show's lessons on love, they are more suited to serious opera than frivolous musicals. Still, a talented cast, particularly Katherine Kingsley's Rose, miraculously deliver something more stirring than mere melodrama.