This modern high-school musical with a baroque twist splices Japanese manga aesthetics with a classic Broadway sound, which makes for a strange hybrid creation. Adapted from Naoshi Arakawa’s bestselling manga, what works on paper (and as an anime TV series) appears rather more stuttering on stage.
It features a sad love story between piano prodigy Kōsei Arima (Zheng Xi Yong), who is unable to hear the music he plays after the death of his mother (Lucy Park), and free-spirit Kaori Miyazono (Mia Kobayashi), who inspires him to perform again.
The book of the Japanese production, which premiered in 2017 and was written by Riko Sakaguchi, is translated into English by Rinne Groff. Squeezed in between songs, it is full of cheesy cliches.
Directed and choreographed by Nick Winston, characters are Japanese but Americanised and schematic. Kōsei and Kaori are played with immense verve but there is little room for them to breathe and they are smothered by flat characterisation. Alongside them is a self-parodying high-school hunk (Dean John-Wilson) and Kōsei’s quietly tormented best friend (Rachel Clare Chan), both hastily sketched and overfamiliar.
They are set amid an overdramatic, underexplained plot that veers into baroque, The Phantom of the Opera-style melodrama, and it squeezes the imagination out of the manga elements, which are relegated to a back-screen.
The set design by Justin Williams as a whole is mystifying, with a thrown-together look. A piano takes centre stage, with a Japanese staircase and platform on either side, and school lockers or hospital chairs zooming on and off.
The visual manga elements are disappointingly few, with repeated closeups of the face of Kōsei’s mother every time her ghost appears on stage. These manga style illustrations seem like suddenly remembered add-ons, in the background and occasional when they could have been far more prominently and creatively used.
There are moments when the show enters into more accomplished storytelling, and you feel the angst or yearning of these characters, but this is not sustained.
At least Frank Wildhorn’s music, with lyrics by Carly Robyn Green and Tracy Miller, delivers in its drama and Yong plays live piano to boot, sometimes accompanied by violinist, Akiko Ishikawa.
Strong numbers such as Perfect and One Single Moment are belted out, with every song entering into melodrama so you wish for less volume, more texture.
But they do eke out emotions where character and story fails and the songs, along with spirited performances, become the show’s saving grace.
• At Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 21 September
