How do you follow up a colossal megahit like The Phantom of the Opera? That must have been the question on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mind when he approached the late 1980s. His Cats, Starlight Express, & Phantom had helped changed the way musicals were produced and marketed in the West End. Two of those shows did even better on Broadway than in London.
One thing you can do when you’ve gone all-out with a mostly sung-through maximalist musical is write something more restrained, perhaps a chamber musical? Something for a smaller venue? His next show would have fewer characters and would not have an overly ambitious reach, but even though it might have been conceived as an intimate entertainment, Aspects of Love was still produced with aplomb in lavish, state-of-the-art design. In recent years, however, it has been given as intimate offerings in multiple revivals across the U. K.
David Garnett was a member of the Bloomsbury group in the early-middle 20th century. His mother, Constance Garnett, was a noted translator of Russian novelists. Her son’s output included a small novella, Aspects of Love, about an impetuous British soldier named Alexis and his goings-on with the French actress Rose Vibert. Multiple couplings dot the very European story focusing on bohemians in the French countryside during and between the Wars.
Tim Rice first brought the novella to Lloyd Webber’s attention in the mid-1970s. The idea was to have written it as a film musical with its multiple scenes spreading across about twenty years. But the project never did materialize. When The Phantom was safely at home in London and on Broadway, the stage was finally set for another Lloyd Webber hit. The dashing, young lyricist Charles Hart, who had written the lion’s share of the Phantom lyrics, was recruited to collaborate with Don Black, the lyricist of Song and Dance, on the vast exercise. Aspects was, again, a mostly sung-through musical—almost an operetta, except not comic. The finished musical has one or two spoken lines. Those were provided by Lloyd Webber himself, who chose to adapt the novella as the sole credited bookwriter.
The casting of Aspects of Love was tabloid fodder. An unknown American actress, Ann Crumb, was chosen to star as Rose and Michael Ball, said to be one of the true finds from the original cast of Les Misérables, was to co-star as the solider, now named Alex. The biggest news, however, was that former James Bond Roger Moore was to finish out the cast in his first role for the musical theatre. In the end, Moore did not feel his singing voice up to the task and bowed out, leaving Kevin Colson, his understudy, to take the part.
Aspects of Love opened in the West End in 1988 and ran for several years. The Broadway production, essentially a replica, ran out of steam after a couple of months. The story was hardly American faire and, while it had a few genuine hits like “Love Changes Everything” and “The First Man You Remember,” those did not get radio play in the states. Nevertheless, from then on, New York critics would be less kind to Lloyd Webber. Perhaps retaliation for the madcap successes of Cats & Phantom?
Aspects is a lovely, mature musical—its score rapturous, its lyrics skilled, its story moving. Numbers like “Hand Me the Wine and the Dice” and “Falling” show Lloyd Webber trying to do something legitimately different and succeeding, at least artistically. As mentioned above, revivals have skewed toward more minimal approaches. Aspects does not demand extravagance or restraint. As long as the scenes flow in a cinematic fashion, the production should move audiences. Below, Michael Ball singing “Love Changes Everything.”
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