Romance, Mostly Misguided

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

ASPECTS OF LOVE Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart

Not every musical is gutsy enough to make its big ballad the first words an audience hears, or to introduce both its other showstopper tunes within the next 20 or so minutes. But then few composers have the confidence in the spectator -- or maybe it's just the chutzpah -- to recycle the same few melodies over and over, in endless allusive variations, for nearly three hours.

That nervy economy of means is the trademark of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who assumes -- correctly, to judge from box-office receipts -- that theatergoing adults take delight in hearing a catchy tune repeated as often as Top 40 songs on teenybopper radio stations. In lesser hands (for that matter, in his own earlier shows), this repetition can suggest paucity of imagination or a kind of melodic stinginess. But in Aspects of Love, the London hit that opens on Broadway this week, the technique works: the tunes bear repeating, and the repetition binds a diffuse story of mostly misguided romance. The impact is haunting.

Past Lloyd Webber extravaganzas concerned animals (Cats), machines (Starlight Express), wraiths (The Phantom of the Opera), icons (Evita) and divinities (Jesus Christ Superstar). His delicate and intimate new work, adapted from a 1955 novel by Britain's David Garnett, is about ordinary human beings learning life's painful lessons. The affections on display include the parental, filial and fraternal; but the emphasis is on the romantic, which takes place mostly between partners of unlike ages and is presented as primarily a process of teaching. Events are often melodramatic, but the tone is rueful and autumnal. From the opening moment, a tearstained flashback, love is treated, to use phrases from the score, as a "happy moment" rather than the "journey of a lifetime."

The central characters are Alex (Michael Ball), first seen as a boy of 17; Rose (Ann Crumb), the much older workaday actress with whom he is smitten; and his silver-haired uncle George (Kevin Colson), whom Rose marries for love and money. Over the years, all three have flings with Giulietta (Kathleen Rowe McAllen), an Italian sculptor, and Alex and George display more than familial interest in George's daughter Jenny (played by Deanna Du Clos at age 12, and by her sister Danielle at a nubile 14). In addition, each of these worldly figures, save Jenny, has countless other liaisons. Infidelity is treated as a commonplace of sophisticated marriage, jealousy as an adolescent joke.

The composer, director Trevor Nunn and designer Maria Bjornson have tinkered ! in various ways since London, but the main change is in the acting: the people have been made less brittle and more likable. That is in keeping with the cunning naivete of the score. The musical highlights are Love Changes Everything, a ditty as simple and optimistic as a nursery rhyme; Seeing Is Believing, a surge of passion as relentless as teenage infatuation; and a melody almost Viennese in its air of casual resignation, introduced to the lyric "Life goes on, love goes free." Aspects of Love may go on for years. It is, however, far from free: the top price is $55, and worth every cent.