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ASPECTS OF LOVE Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber...
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...
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...
...long odds. To begin with, the weather in February is less than hospitable, and the Taj is hard to get to from most parts of the country. Traffic congeals on summer weekends, train service is poor, and the airport lacks a real passenger terminal. Costs are high, says Paine Webber analyst Lee Isgur, "because basically New Jersey is a scummy place for unions and bureaucracy." The present mayor has been indicted for corruption and influence peddling, the fourth of the past six incumbents to be charged with a crime...
...with Broadway, an old adage holds, that three hit shows can't cure. Actually, not much has been wrong this season anyway. Blockbuster survivors from prior years were joined last fall by four musicals and three plays that all seem securely established, and major new works by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Neil Simon and August Wilson are still to come. But in a five-day span leading into this week, the proverbial three hit shows materialized nonetheless, one after another, gladdening the Great White Way's chronic curmudgeons...