Daily Mail

Same show 34 years on — and Michael Ball blows us away all over again

- By Patrick Marmion

Aspects Of Love (Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbur­y Avenue) Verdict: Great moments, long half hours ★★★☆☆

HOW time goes by. y. Thirty-four years ago, o, a coltish, 26-year-old d Michael Ball was the smoulderin­g young English lover in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical about a love pentagon between sybaritic artistes in post-war France.

Now, at the tender age of 60, the nicest guy in showbiz is playing George

— a rich, old walrus of love (with a dodgy ticker) in Jonathan Kent’s revival of the self-same show.

His character laments drooping jowls s and a midriff in need of a buttress.

The truth is, though, that the years ars have been kinder to Ball than they have ave been to Aspects.

It’s a show that grapples with a mid- d-life crisis all of its own.

For starters, the plot: the story’s bed-hopping -hop even and cradle-snatching might make even Alan Clark, Lothario of legend, wince. At the start, the 18-year- old English youth, Alex (Jamie Bogyo), scores with French actress Rose (Laura Pitt-Pulford), who’s seven years his senior.

Much more uncomforta­ble, after the interval, is when a greying Alex (still played by Bogyo, after a quick trip to hair and make-up) turns his eye on Rose’s 18-year-old daughter Jenny (Anna Unwin).

This is not a relationsh­ip about which we, the audience, feel too well- disposed. Forming the fifth point of this starshaped love tangle is Danielle De Niese’s sexually omnivorous Italian sculptor, who toys with both men and (momentaril­y) Rose as well. Affairs of the heart are punctuated by comic melodrama, including Rose’s fainting fit in Venice. And the inconclusi­ve ending is both anti-climactic and void.

And yet the show throbs with some of Baron Lloyd-Webber’s finest tunes. The blushing innocence of Seeing Is Believing, the enchantmen­t of Chanson d’enfance, and the big spine-tingling show-stopper, Love Changes Everything. In between, we’re abandoned to the musical doldrums, with some of Lloyd Webber’s weakest links, which tease us with the whisper of a reprise.

In what seems like a star-crossed attempt to emulate the sungthroug­h chit- chat of Stephen Sondheim, Don Black and Charles Hart’s lyrics are too often too turgid. In one line, the unsingable combines with the unspeakabl­e: ‘George used to say you can have more than one emotion at the same time.’

And yet, in Ball they have a oneman rescue operation. His big, furry, faintly camp, six-gigawatt stage presence warms the audience like a sun lamp — while his honeyed voice blows us to sunnier climes.

And in his more thoughtful moments alone, he is tender, garlanding his performanc­e with the grace notes of an impish glance, rueful smile and a moistened eye.

PITTPULFOR­D, as his fiery and needy muse, has a voice like homemade lemonade, that bursts into vintage champagne here and there — fortified with brandy in later life.

Bogyo is a ripped, manly Alex, tormented by conscience, who is rescued, eventually, by De Niese. And Anna Unwin infuses Jenny’s vulnerable youth with verve.

Alas, though, too much hinges on John Macfarlane’s stunning, ever shifting scenery: whisking us from a Parisian bar, via a railway carriage, to a sunkissed terrace in Provence — beyond which lie mountains painted in the style of Cezanne. And let’s not forget views of Venice’s Grand Canal.

Much love has been poured into this Aspects by all involved, and thankfully its sweetest moments make it worth the effort.

 ?? Picture: JOHAN PERSSON ?? Stage presence: Michael Ball and Laura Pitt-Pulford
Picture: JOHAN PERSSON Stage presence: Michael Ball and Laura Pitt-Pulford

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