Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love is to close in the West End three months earlier than scheduled.
A revival of Webber’s 1989 musical opened in London’s Lyric Theatre on 25 May, where it was met with lukewarm reviews.
The production stars Michael Ball as George, having originated the role of Alex (here played by Jamie Bogyo) in the 1989 West End production. Laura Pitt-Pulford, Danielle de Niese and Anna Unwin also star.
The show was scheduled to run until 11 November, but on Friday (30 June), it was announced that Aspects of Love will now conclude on 19 August. Ticket holders will be contacted at their point of purchase.
Aspects of Love follows the intersecting romantic relationships within a group over a 17-year period, but has been criticised for depicting 18-year-old Alex (Bogyo) falling in love with his cousin Jenny (Anna Unwin) when she is just 12.
In the production, it is changed so that Jenny and Alex get together when she is 18, not 15, as in the original. The song “It Won’t Be Long till Jenny’s a Woman” – branded a “creeptastic closing number” by The Independent’s Alice Saville – is also cut from the production.
However, many critics questioned why Webber’s musical – which features the musical theatre standard “Love Changes Everything” – had been revived at all, given the subject matter.
In her two-star review for The Independent, Saville wrote: “Given that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s back catalogue includes musicals about randy trains (Starlight Express) and a feline death cult (Cats), it’s kind of surprising that his weirdest ever show is about the relatively normal subject of love affairs in rural France.
Anna Unwin and Michael Ball in ‘Aspects of Love'— (Johan Persson)
“But with its skin-crawlingly uncomfortable age-gap romances, Aspects of Love still finds plenty of ways to disconcert an audience lured in by the star appeal of musical theatre legend Michael Ball.”
At the Evening Standard, Nick Curtis wrote: “It’s hard to see why Andrew Lloyd Webber thought this creepy and downright silly chamber musical was a good idea in 1989, let alone ripe for revival now.”
In Variety, David Benedict echoed: “The 1989 original production ran in London for three years. This, its first major revival, is unlikely even to approach that. The piece itself may well be en route to becoming justly neglected.”
More generous, Time Out’s Andrzek Lukowski said that Aspects of Love is “quite good fun if you can avoid thinking too hard about what’s actually going on”.
