The Beautiful Game

American responses to Andrew Lloyd Webber's new West End musical, "The Beautiful Game," may be immaterial. Putting the show's merits aside, its subject matter alone makes it a long shot for Broadway. Set in Belfast in 1969, the musical explores the way the Protestant-Catholic conflict gradually constricts and ultimately destroys the lives of a handful

American responses to Andrew Lloyd Webber's new West End musical, "The Beautiful Game," may be immaterial. Putting the show's merits aside, its subject matter alone makes it a long shot for Broadway. Set in Belfast in 1969, the musical explores the way the Protestant-Catholic conflict gradually constricts and ultimately destroys the lives of a handful of young football players.

American responses to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new West End musical, “The Beautiful Game,” may be immaterial. Putting the show’s merits aside, its subject matter alone makes it a long shot for Broadway. Set in Belfast in 1969, the musical explores the way the Protestant-Catholic conflict gradually constricts and ultimately destroys the lives of a handful of young football players.

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To U.S. audiences, of course, the beautiful game is baseball; football, which we call soccer, is an also-ran in the national sports consciousness; and the Troubles in Northern Ireland are merely one among many world conflicts the Clinton administration has been doggedly mediating for the nearly a decade. If “The Beautiful Game” was a brilliant piece of musical theater, these obstacles might be surmountable, but this ambitious and, in many ways admirable, show gradually sags and stumbles under the weight of its flaws, chiefly a simplistic and sermonizing approach to a complex subject.

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The musical opens with a somber but arresting flourish as the softly lit stage gradually fills with lads whose idle kicking of a can takes on the lyricism of dance. The choreography of Meryl Tankard, one of several collaborators on the show culled not from showbiz but from the world of ballet and opera, is refreshingly inventive, using the vocabulary of the sport to express the energies and aggressions of youth that, as the show proceeds, will be channeled more destructively. Joined by their admiring female supporters, this ragtag band, attired in the garishly realistic colors of Joan Bergin’s costumes, launch into the show’s title tune, an authentically rousing anthem that displays Lloyd Webber’s ability to craft melodies that lodge in the heart or the mind almost against our will.

In the following scenes we’re introduced to the players whose personal and political fortunes will be followed through to their almost universally grim ends. John (David Shannon) is the cocky but good-hearted star of the team, happily oblivious to the conflicts simmering outside the locker room. Thomas (Michael Shaeffer), by contrast, is an ardent young Republican who insists on bringing politics to the playing field, and in a rather abrupt scene sees to the ouster of the team’s lone Protestant, Del (Ben Goddard). The big-boned Ginger (Dale Meeks) and the rascally Daniel (Jamie Golding) are the hapless but cheery sort who provide for plenty of comic relief.

Much has been made in the British press of the teaming of Lloyd Webber with Ben Elton, the novelist, playwright and sitcom writer who supplies the show’s book and lyrics. This surprising union of “the Tory peer and the left-wing standup comedian,” as one commentator put it, is seen as evidence that Lloyd Webber is looking in new directions for inspiration. His reputation has taken a battering in recent years after the tepid performances of his last two shows, “Sunset Boulevard” and “Whistle Down the Wind.”

Certainly, Elton’s book boasts generous lashings of a gritty populist wit that’s entirely welcome. (“I’ve never had a shag in the middle of a riot before,” remarks one character in a deadpan brogue.) There are probably more authentic laughs in “Beautiful Game” than in the rest of the Lloyd Webber oeuvre put together. But Elton’s lyrics are rudimentary, relying exclusively on numbingly predictable rhymes: school/cool, bad/sad. “You’re great/You’re my best mate,” sings a lad to his love. The chief distinction of Elton’s lyrical writing is a certain vulgar brio: words like “sod,” “twat” and “git” are surely making their first appearances in the Lloyd Webber canon.

In any case, the cheeky comic voice that is Elton’s greatest contribution to the collaboration must recede into the background fairly quickly. By the end of the first act, the beautiful game is superseded by the terrible Troubles as the musical’s focus (by evening’s end we’ve witnessed only one soccer game compared with two murders and a kneecapping). And here Elton and Lloyd Webber soon lose sight of their characters amid the exigencies of politics and plot.

The women are the show’s persistently preaching voices of pacifist wisdom. Mary (Josie Walker), John’s girlfriend and later wife, tirelessly champions the cause of nonviolence and reason as the boys are gradually drawn into the sectarian conflict. Meanwhile, the rebellious Christine (Hannah Waddingham) falls in love with Protestant Del, with predictably dangerous results. Lloyd Webber’s affection for soaring ballads is indulged in “Our Kind of Love,” the show’s neat equivalent of “West Side Story’s” “Somewhere,” in which Christine sings that “my love is stronger than their hate.”

There’s no arguing with the show’s overriding endorsement of brotherly love, but there’s no seriously engaging with it either. Well before the end of the first act we are treated to the news that hate and violence are bad and love is good; this indisputable idea is then repeated tirelessly throughout act two. “Let Us Love in Peace” and “If This Is What We’re Fighting For” are two more heartfelt songs that express essentially the same sentiment. Both Walker and Waddingham are terrific singers who infuse their characters with plenty of feisty charm, but they cannot overcome the rote nature of the show’s moral positions. The male performers, no less talented, are similarly burdened by dialogue that always puts the predictable trajectory of the show’s plot ahead of nuanced definition of character.

It’s telling that the show’s most engaging scene reveals its characters not as doomed victims of circumstance or moralizing philosophers but as anxious, endearingly awkward human beings. The second act opens with a lively, funny sequence in which Mary and John sing of their uncertainties as they face the marriage bed for the first time. A continued focus on the specifics of character might have alleviated the show’s schematic feeling, but this brief holiday from fate’s grim agenda is soon over, and before long the wheels of the musical are dutifully grinding alongside those of history to bring things to an inevitably bleak ending.

The staging only serves to emphasize the show’s sermonizing tone. Director Robert Carsen, an opera specialist, places the action in a completely black no man’s land under a blasted proscenium. Jean Kalman’s lighting is expressive but rigorously stark. Clearly we are not here to have fun but to face facts. (Set designer Michael Levine is allowed a few nice flourishes: During a lilting song comparing Ireland to the promised land, windows open up in the monolithic black brick wall that forms the backdrop, illustrating the idyllic beauty of the land that’s obscured by the ravaging hate of its populace.)

Color is provided only by costumes, presumably in an attempt to keep the focus on the human story. But this tactic can only pay dividends if the characters have the vividness and distinction to really light up the darkness of the world they inhabit. Despite Lloyd Webber’s trademark soaring melodies — occasionally inflected with Irish overtones — and the impassioned efforts of a uniformly fine cast, the boys and girls of “The Beautiful Game” have no such incandescence. The show’s authors have not created characters with enough flesh on their bones to make these familiar issues sing to us afresh.

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The Beautiful Game

Cambridge Theater (London); 1,250 seats; £37.50 ($54.50) top

  • Production: A Really Useful Co. presentation of a musical in two acts with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and book and lyrics by Ben Elton. Directed by Robert Carsen.
  • Crew: Musical direction, Kennedy Aitchison. Choreography, Meryl Tankard. Sets, Michael Levine; costumes, Joan Bergin; lighting, Jean Kalman; sound, Martin Levan; musical supervision, Simon Lee; orchestrations, Lloyd Webber and David Cullen. Opened, reviewed Sept. 26, 2000. Running time: 2 HOURS, 35 MIN.
  • Cast: Father O'Donnell - Frank Grimes Thomas - Michael Shaeffer Daniel - Jamie Golding Ginger - Dale Meeks Del - Ben Goddard John - David Shannon Mary - Josie Walker Christine - Hannah Waddingham Bernadette - Alex Sharpe Protestant Girl - Dianne Pilkington Sean Kelly - Nicholas Roud and Crais Shenton With: Jonathan Ball, Michael Bernardin, Keith Bookman, Sally Bourne, James Bowden, Jenna Boyd, Kevin Cregan, Shonagh Daly, Nic Greenshields, Ben Heathcote, Mark Hilton, Michele Hooper, Simon Humphrey, Christopher Key, David Lyons, Grant Murphy, Kelly O'Leary, Greta Rochford, Andrew Spillett, Alessandro Splendore, Paul Tarling, Hannah Tollman.Musical numbers: "The Beautiful Game," "Clean the Kit," "Don't Like You," "God's Own Country," "Let Us Love in Peace," "The Final (A Game of Two Halves)," "The Craic," "Our Kind of Love," "The Happiest Day," "To Have and to Hold," "The First Time," "I'd Rather Die on My Feet Than Live on My Knees," "Dead Zone," "If This Is What We're Fighting For," "All the Love I Have."

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