‘Stodgy’ Phantom sequel gets lukewarm reviews

THERE were lukewarm reviews for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies yesterday with some critics doubtful the long-awaited sequel to The Phantom Of The Opera will prove as successful as the original.

Writing in The Daily Mail, Quentin Letts declared: “A hit? Not quite.”

Charles Spencer, in The Daily Telegraph, described the musical as “Lloyd Webber’s finest show since the original Phantom”.

But, he wondered whether audiences would fork out for “two-and-a- half hours of dark Gothic imaginings” and “seething passion”.

Letts writes off the opening as “stodgy”, complaining it did not really “smoke into life” until 20 minutes in – and even then it “sputters for a while”.

He said the first scene was memorable only for its “expensive backdrop” of New York’s Coney Island with its fairground rides, dancing girls and a “horror-movie- style lair for the Phantom”.

Letts also pointed to a “lack of solid story-telling” – a sentiment echoed by other critics.

Michael Billington in The Guardian said: “What the show lacks, in a nutshell, is narrative tension”, while Benedict Nightingale, in The Times, asked: “So where’s the tension in Ben Elton and Lloyd Webber’s book?”

Billington was impressed by the music, costumes and set design.

“The score is one of the composer’s most seductive. Bob Crowley’s design and Jack O’Brien’s direction have a beautiful kaleidoscopic fluidity.”

However, Nightingale said that Ramin Karimloo’s Phantom is far less menacing than the “phantom we knew” – having “clearly taken an anger management course”.

“Would he whimsically hang the backstage crew or send a chandelier crashing into a crowd? Not any more. Even his blemish, which only ever looked as if an aspiring seamstress had done a little sewing practice, seems tidier,” he wrote.