Apparently, the world is split between those who are moved and those unmoved by Erich Segal's tale of undergraduate love that ends in early death. It is the romantics verses the cynics.
Segal's 1970 film, with Ryan O'Neal as the privileged Harvard jock who falls for Ali MacGraw's working-class student, had audiences crying their eyes out. And in this new musical version Howard Goodall's delicate score strokes heart- and violin strings (the latter played by an onstage ensemble) just as touchingly, or, if you are one the cynics, just as manipulatively as the film did.
The late Segal may well have approved of this show. Rachel Kavanaugh's production is a well sung, classy affair led by two strong performances from Michael Xavier and Emma Williams. Stephen Clarke's book and lyrics stay true to much of Segal's dialogue, although he has wisely dropped the famous "love means never having to say you're sorry" line, which after years of sentimental and then ironic use would have been landed with the clunk of a horseshoe.
Goodall's score manages to restrict the famous Love Story theme to a brief piano outing, and he has a fair claim to have created the best British musical in years. But there is no getting away from the story's Victorian-style melodrama. Sure I ended up with a tear in my eye? But wallowing in mawkishness also left this romantic cynic with resentment in his heart.
www.duchesstheatre.co.uk