Most big musicals are indelibly identified with their original productions. Who can imagine ”Evita,” for example, without the balcony scene devised by director Harold Prince, or ”My Fair Lady,” without the ”Ascot Gavotte” staged by Moss Hart, or ”Bye Bye Birdie” without the ”Telephone Hour” choreographed by Gower Champion?
But ”Aspects of Love,” which opens here Thursday in the Civic Theatre, is a rarity in musical theater. It`s a rethinking and restaging of a musical that already has had major London and New York openings in an entirely different production.
”Aspects,” the latest musical by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, had its premier in London in the spring of 1989 in a production directed by Trevor Nunn, who had guided Lloyd Webber`s ”Cats” to its phenomenal success. It is still running there, though its Broadway transfer, also staged by Nunn, closed in March of 1991 after an indifferent 11-month run and has never gone on tour.
Based on a 1955 novella by David Garnett, ”Aspects” was conceived by the composer as an intimate work, more like a piece of chamber music than the large scale presentation of his ”The Phantom of the Opera.”
Its story outlines several aspects of love-including heterosexual, homosexual, jealous and obsessive-as it traces the intertwining lives of its five central characters. There are no huge crowd scenes, no obvious opportunities for spectacle.
By the time the musical reached the London stage, however, it had become a very big deal, wrapped in splendid vistas fashioned by Maria Bjornson, who also had designed the elaborate sets for Lloyd Webber`s ”Phantom.” But because this version did not have the immediate popular appeal that could guarantee box office results for a touring production, no plans were made to take its relatively heavy production on the road.
At this point, enter Live Entertainment Corporation of Canada, a Toronto- based organization headed by Garth Drabinsky, former chief executive officer of the movie theater chain Cineplex Odeon. The new organization already had the rights to present the Toronto production of ”Phantom,” and, having established that link with Lloyd Webber, Drabinsky was looking for other stage projects to launch.
To that end, he asked Robin Phillips, former artistic director of the Stratford Festival of Canada, to see the Broadway ”Aspects” and to comment on it.
”He asked me to respond to what I had seen,” Phillips recalls, ”and I told him over a chat that I liked the production very much, but that I saw it as a smaller rather than a bigger show. I was interested in the score, and I admired Trevor`s direction-but I don`t always see things the same way he does. Actually, as it turned out, Andrew was eager to have a second shot at the show.”
Before he knew it, Phillips, who has little experience in musical theater and a world of credits in classical drama, was asked to restage ”Aspects”
for a new production.
To prepare himself, Phillips took a long look at a videotape of an early concert version that Lloyd Webber had presented at his summer home.
”It was very simple,” Phillips says. ”Just a group of chairs and everybody in evening dress; but emotionally it had great color and vitality. I think Andrew was at his closest to the piece when it was at that stage, so what I tried to do was get it back to this original vision.”
Instead of the complex scene changes of the London-Broadway design, Phillips saw just ”an elegant room shaded and shrouded into the distance.”
This made the whole production much simpler, and much easier to tour, as well. Casting the show, Phillips says, took ”a jolly long period of search.”
But when he saw Linda Balgord, a Chicagoan, audition for the leading role of Rose Vibert, the actress whose many loves form the musical`s plot, ”I knew immediately that she was right for the character, who is not a sexy Broadway leading lady, but a very nurturing, maternal woman.”
Keith Michell, who portrays the sophisticated older painter in love with Rose, is a television (”The Six Wives of Henry VIII,” ”Murder, She Wrote”) and stage (”Robert and Elizabeth”) actor with extensive experience in both the classics and musicals; and Ron Bohmer, as the fiery young man who has a passionate affair with her, is a ”real find,” Phillips says, who had the requisite vocal range and physical sexiness for the role.
According to Phillips, Lloyd Webber contributed his part to the production in a lot of pre-rehearsal reshaping, cutting and editing of his score. The show`s songs, with lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart, are still all there, including the thematic ”Love Changes Everything,” but much of the second act was reworked to keep the interwoven threads of the story clearly in view.
With its 18 roles cast, many of them with American performers, the revised, restaged ”Aspects” first opened last September as part of the subscription season of Edmonton`s Citadel Theatre, where Phillips is director general, and then moved in December under the Live banner to the Elgin Theatre in Toronto. Its Chicago engagement, Drabinsky hopes, will be the first of several tour stops in the United States.
Phillips, preparing for the first Chicago opening of his career, looks back ”with a bit of awe” on his ”Aspects” experience.
”Musicals are very new to me,” he says, ”and I`m not a good singer, so I deliberately kept my mouth shut during song rehearsals. But when we got into dress rehearsals, I forgot myself and started singing along with the actors.
”I was standing just beside the sound engineer, who heard this desperate high falsetto squeak and immediately looked under his control panel to see what in the devil had gone wrong with it.
”I had to explain to him that nothing was wrong, that it was only the director trying to sing. Very embarrassing.”
