"Aspects of Love' at the Walnut

As a romantic drama, Aspects of Love was a critical and financial flop when it opened in 1989. It suffered with the shortest run of any Andrew Lloyd Webber show in London and less than a year's run on Broadway, losing all of its investors' money. But the script benefits when you looks upon it as a Gallic farce.

The title of the main song, "Love Changes Everything," is itself a jest. Neither love, nor transient passion changes the characters at all. The principal characters repeat their patterns over a period of almost two decades, throughout which the leading man remains in a state of arrested development.

Consider what goes on: Alex, age 17, meets an older actress backstage and quickly convinces her to go away with him to "his" villa, which really is his uncle's. The uncle steals Alex's lover; the kid pulls out a gun and wounds the woman; this hedonistic gold-digger shuttles back and forth between the beds of both men and a lesbian.

Fifteen years later, when Alex is 32, he flirts with his 12-year-old cousin, who's the daughter of his ex-lover and Alex's uncle. In the next scene the niece has turned 15 and she and Alex are sleeping together, in the same bed with the stuffed animal that Alex brought as a gift.

Surely, you can't take this stuff seriously. The only sane approach is to treat it as the sex farce that it is.

From Venice to the Pyrenees

Thankfully, director Bruce Lumpkin achieves a sophisticated detachment and emphasizes the comic moments. This approach works much better than Trevor Nunn's serious productions a generation ago in London and New York.

The show contains no less than 38 scenes, skipping from a performance of Ibsen's The Master Builder in a French provincial town to Venice to the Pyrenees. This production depicts the changes smoothly.

The casting is excellent, with Charles Hagerty capturing Alex's immaturity more convincingly than did Michael Ball, who originated the role. Paul Schoeffler is suave as the uncle and Laurent Giroux brings urbane sophistication to his theatrical manager.

Jennifer Hope Willis looks lovely as Rose Vibert, the object of men's desires. She brings out the rich depth of the role's songs, which possess more variety than those sung by Christine in The Phantom of the Opera (a part that Willis has sung on Broadway).

But the accent she uses for this French woman is pure American. Alex achieves a proper English sound, but Willis brings no Continental color to her speech, apparently in a misguided effort to keep the dialogue understandable to the Walnut's middlebrow audience.

Webber's paramour

This colorful production calls attention to the protagonists' self-indulgence and immaturity and brings out their laughable excesses. But ultimately it can't overcome the problem that the characters are shallow and unlikable.

The blame for this confusing tone rests mostly with Andrew Lloyd Webber. He is so talented as a creator of passionate songs that in his case he tips a story about immature dunces too far in the direction of love.

Lloyd Webber clearly was intrigued by extra-marital adventures. When the composer was married to is first wife but carrying on an affair with Sarah Brightman, he had the audacity to write a song on the subject ("A Married Man") and to accompany Brightman as she sang it on TV. This is no idle gossip: I have it on tape.

(Later, Webber buried that song by setting the tune to a new set of words and re-dubbing the title to "The Music of the Night" for use in The Phantom of the Opera.)

He slept with Garbo?

Lloyd Webber was similarly fascinated by Aspects of Love, the novella by David Garnett, a flamboyant bisexual member of England's elite Bloomsbury Group who claimed to have slept with Greta Garbo. When one of Garnett's gay lovers married and had a daughter, Garnett wrote: "I think of marrying it [sic!]. When she is 20, I shall be 46. Will it be scandalous?" Garnett claimed that he was the model for the novella's uncle. Although the New York Times critic Frank Rich pronounced the novella "insipid," Lloyd Webber called it ''a little jewel.''

In writing the show's music, Lloyd Webber avoided what he called "a big, grandiose, romantic style," instead writing delicate orchestrations. Douglass Lutz adapts and conducts them beautifully.

But Lloyd Webber never applied himself sufficiently to the idea of a droll comedy of manners. Stephen Sondheim— with his bittersweet story of failed connections, A Little Night Music— succeeded where Lloyd Webber fails. Nevertheless, Aspects of Love remains a fascinating work, if only for its audacity and outrageousness.♦


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