I can only raise one small, subdued cheer for Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest escapade, a show so old-fashioned it deserves to be stuffed and displayed in a museum for deceased musicals. Only William Dudley's dizzying, computerised video designs, which make the images of a bare, neo-gothic country home look like an estate agent's advertisements on the internet, provide a contemporary touch.
I came out humming with boredom: there is just one catchy song - the lovely I Believe My Heart - that loiters in the mind and might be a hit. The rest, from Trying Not To Notice to If I Could Only Dream This World Away, vanish speedily down the memory drain to the accompaniment of Lloyd Webber's sobbing, soar-away string music. This might almost be called operetta: there is far too much recitative.
The composer and his talented accomplice, director Trevor Nunn, clearly intend that The Woman In White, freely adapted from Wilkie Collins's romantic melodrama novel of 1860, should chill the blood or raise goose pimples. I was left merely cold and unpimpled.
Angela Christian's bland young Woman In White, who haunts a railway cutting one misty midnight and a churchyard later, hints at dastardly goings-on. Two youngish sisters, Laura and Marian, at little ease in their Cumberland home with their effeminate uncle (Edward Petherbridge) find themselves at the limited mercy of a sinister baronet called Sir Percival Glyde (Oliver Darley) and his greasy Italian sidekick, Count Fosco (Michael Crawford, unrecognisable in his pumped-up costume). No respectable girl would give this continental aristocrat the time of night for which he hopes. Thank God for Laura's smitten drawing master, Walter Hartright, who knows a villain when he sees one.
How ridiculous rather than sinister all this sounds. So it proves in Nunn's over-operatic production. If only Lloyd Webber had realised Charlotte Jones's free adaptation of Collins's original was preposterous. He then might have created a lighthearted musical that satirised a Victorian obsession with ghosts, illegitimacy and the sexual purity of young women threatened by foreigners or decadent aristocrats. No such hope. The unexciting action moves ponderously. Lloyd Webber's music struggles to match the dramatic twists - news of a sudden death or Marian's crucial discovery in a lunatic asylum.
David Zippel's lyrics, always ready to dazzle us with clichés - "You'll be all right, his bark is worse than his bite" - are as discordantly modern as Dudley's computer graphics whose quick-change scene-settings make the musical seem more cinematic than theatrical.
When it comes to sex - and this being a very Victorian musical, sex hardly comes at all - The Woman In White settles for soulful, frustrated yearning. Lloyd Webber's music likes to linger on the verge of a climax. And Jill Paice's Pre-Raphaelite Laura, engaged to Glyde, contents herself for ages with no more than a touch to the chest of Martin Crewes's handsome drawing-master.
Michael Crawford offers a lovely antidote to the strident melodramatics in the perky, preening shape of the randily insinuating, bird-loving Fosco. His You Can Get Away With Anything is a comic delight. The show is, though, carried by Maria Friedman's fine, emotionally-charged Marian and Crewes, who displays a terrific vocal range when he puts Walter's bleeding heart on display. This duo cannot, however, save The Woman in White from laboriously wearing very thin.
The Woman In White
