Review Details
- Anyone with a heart will laugh louder, cry harder and come our singing...
«Andy Williams sand: 'Where do I begin? To tell the story of how great a love can be' to the theme tune of Erich Segal's famous weepie Love Story.
Howard Goodall knows precisely where to begin his marvellously moving new musical version. With the fact that Jenny is going to die.
Then he does everything the film does but much better, with lots of piano and strings and lovely, lush, romantic melodies and all in 110minutes. Anyone with a heart will laugh louder, cry harder and come our singing: 'Say love's a bridge to cross the ocean.'
What more could one wish for except to see it again? I hope is transfers to London - and fast.
Goodall even pays witty homage to the film and Jenny, the doomed pianist, playing the unforgettable theme music at a recital.
Rachel Kavanaugh's slick, spare production unravels simply, with puffy clouds whooshing accross a white wall and the orchestra on the stage.
It's pretty much love at first sight for Emma Williams's fabulously feisty Jenny and Michael Xavier's dishy ice-hockey jock, Oliver Barreett IV, kids from opposite sides of the tracks.
Jenny is a poor Italian-American; he's a 'preppie' (and she won't let him forget it), who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and whose parents don't approve of his new love. Oliver may be a Wasp (white, Anglo-Sason, Proestant), but Jenny's the one with the real sting. Sparks fly, but love blossoms.
Stephen Clark's book sticks close to the original, ditching some of the markishness and hanging on to the nest lines from the film. He even adds a few witty wisecracks (Jenny call Ice-Hockey 'testosterone on the rocks').
But Clark's biggest achievements are making the lovers more real and sympathetic, and bringing out a second love story between fathers and their children.
Some of the best secenes involve dining: it's cosy and casual at Jenny's dad's house where he (plumply perfect Peter Polycarpou) ices a cake for the daughter he adores; it's frosty and formal around the crystal-laden table chez Barrett, where Oliver calls his father 'Sir'.
In a wonderfully sexy scene that fills the theatre with mouth-watering smells, the happy, carefree couple make music and supper in their apartment, chopping garlic and simmering tomatoes, singing a song in which spaghetti rhymes with Donisetti and macaroni with lonely.
But the song that will tug at your heartstrings is the one in which plucky, unlucky Jenny imagines soothing her children to sleep: 'I will sing my kids nocturnes,' she sings.
She won't. Take your biggest hanky.
»
- The Mail on Sunday
