Webber’s New Musical A Mixed Bag – Associated Press

By MATT WOLF, Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) – There’s no denying that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical, “The Beautiful Game,” has an abundance of heart. But the bravery of its ambitions would be greatly improved if the Northern Ireland-based show also had a brain.

Those may sound like harsh words for a venture so self-evidently on the side of the angels. After all, this is a musical that advocates peace and love and finding a way out of the long-standing Catholic-Protestant antipathies in the region. What audience member wouldn’t agree to that?

How pleasing, too, to find a composer whose career has embraced cats (in “Cats”), trains (in “Starlight Express”) and monstrous, dethroned divas (in “Sunset Boulevard”) writing, at last, about people – and soccer, which is blended throughout this tale of sectarian violence.

But for all the emotional directness and vigor of director Robert Carsen’s extremely accomplished production, you can’t help feeling that its subject matter deserves far less simplistic a treatment.

Certainly, few knew what to anticipate before the $4.3 million show’s Sept. 26 opening at the Cambridge Theater. After all, Lloyd Webber’s track record has been spotty lately – his prior West End entry, the 1998 “Whistle Down the Wind,” remains his most feeble venture. And his book writer and lyricist on “The Beautiful Game,” Ben Elton, was a newcomer to musicals.

Lloyd Webber has indeed expanded his collaborative base. The musical’s choreographer, Meryl Tankard, is an Australian darling of the avant-garde. Both Carsen and his excellent designer, Michael Levine, are Canadians drawn from the world of opera. And the show’s look has the minimal austerity that many contemporary opera productions tend toward these days.

The problem with “The Beautiful Game” lies largely with Elton, an English comic, novelist and playwright writing about an Anglo-Irish problem that demands real subtlety, not merely a sermon. It’s as if he awoke one day and discovered that – gee! – violence and hatred are bad. As protest musicals go, “The Beautiful Game” is naive and sophomoric.

The opening number makes for a promising start, the title song displaying Lloyd Webber at his most convincingly anthemic. The appealingly fresh-faced cast leap about the stage, their physicality a mixture of a soccer player’s moves and the exhilarating abstraction of contemporary dance.

But once the script kicks in, the promise fades.

“There are more important things in life than football,” remarks the socially aware Catholic Mary (Josie Walker) to John (David Shannon), the gifted amateur player with whom she falls in love and, in Act 2, weds.

The writing rarely rises above such cliches – except when stooping to innuendo, much of it expressed through the imagery of sports.

The narrative is potentially gripping: The would-be innocent, John, is corrupted by a struggle that sours him on life and love. By the end, he’s been sucked into the very violence he tried to avoid – the athleticism of soccer replaced by the man-to-man combat of bigotry and hate. 

But the fact remains that Northern Ireland’s political situation can’t support Elton’s rent-a-rhyme approach. A glance at some of the song titles in the program (”I’d Rather Die on My Feet Than Live on My Knees,” “If This Is What We’re Fighting For”) tips you off at the baldly presentational level of what is to follow.

That’s too bad, since much of the score finds its composer in a pleasingly wistful and plaintive mode. His critics, however, will resent the customary Lloyd Webber repetition, much in evidence here.

The cast – most of them unknown (Frank Grimes playing the inevitable role of Father O’Donnell, the local priest, is the quasi-exception) – are not just bright-eyed but talented, too.

The two leads rescue the show from merely seeming to be a “West Side Story” rewrite, with John’s slide from star player to 1970s internment camp inmate particularly well charted.

Michael Shaeffer has a scary intensity as Thomas, the show’s incipient revolutionary – a Belfast boy addicted to the very conflict that “The Beautiful Game” wants to see ended.

Fair enough, even if you doubt a stage show’s ability to accomplish in 2 1/2 hours what more than three decades of political negotiation have yet to eradicate.

The problem is that “The Beautiful Game” isn’t really a show; it’s a thinly disguised homily.