fri 06/12/2024

Love Story, Duchess Theatre | reviews, news & interviews

Love Story, Duchess Theatre

Love Story, Duchess Theatre

Good taste reigns, perhaps too much so, in stage musical of famous tearjerker

Tears on the menu? Emma Williams and Michael Xavier whip it up in Howard Goodall's new musicalManuel Harlan

It's not easy these days to stay the course on stage, with one leading female character after another of late failing to make it to the final curtain. I'm thinking of such otherwise diverse heroines as Shakespeare's Juliet and Andrew Lloyd Webber's haunted soprano, Christine, as well as the fraught Fosca of Stephen Sondheim's Passion, who may just remain the last word in women snatched prematurely from the men in their midst. To that list can now be added Jenny Cavilleri, the music-minded 25-year-old at the eternally doomy heart of Love Story, a show whose subtitle could, in fact, be Love Never Dies - except that Jenny, as surely the entire world must already know, sadly does.

It's not easy these days to stay the course on stage, with one leading female character after another of late failing to make it to the final curtain. I'm thinking of such otherwise diverse heroines as Shakespeare's Juliet and Andrew Lloyd Webber's haunted soprano, Christine, as well as the fraught Fosca of Stephen Sondheim's Passion, who may just remain the last word in women snatched prematurely from the men in their midst. To that list can now be added Jenny Cavilleri, the music-minded 25-year-old at the eternally doomy heart of Love Story, a show whose subtitle could, in fact, be Love Never Dies - except that Jenny, as surely the entire world must already know, sadly does.

Howard Goodall here displaces his gift for harmony to a landscape more usually associated with Andrew Lloyd Webber

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