Having had success with sitcoms, novels, plays you'd expect Elton to be good at structuring a story which might explain his success as a bookwriter for musicals and also makes this little nugget very interesting:
"I did it as a favour over a weekend," he says of writing the Phantom of the Opera sequel. "Andrew didn't have the story in any kind of shape at all. He asked me to take a look. I did it as a favour for a bloke. That's it. I don't take much interest in it." Lloyd Webber had been toiling over the project for years, and Elton says he immediately saw where the holes were. The four-page plot synopsis he wrote will form the basis for Love Never Dies...
If he can just fix the title as well.
Anyway, just as an aside, here's my old review of the original cast recording for "The Beautiful Game":
On the pre-opening interview circuit Ben Elton was always keen to point out that The Beautiful Game was the first Andrew Lloyd Webber show with knob gags. Well, here's another first: this is the first Lloyd Webber CD with one of those black-and-white "parental advisory" labels on the front cover (although, to be fair, some of his harsher critics have been issuing health warnings for years now). Even more significantly its Ben Elton's first musical. So the big question is just how well does Britain’s top supplier of knob gags cope with the demands of lyric writing? Well, the jury's still out.
Elton has a reputation as a bit of a political animal but comedy-wise he's always been better at the everyday observational stuff like getting on a train ("Double seat, double seat, got to get a double seat") or the incidental idiocies of love. It’s the same with his lyrics. So, for example, there's a cute number called "Don't Like You" where the two leads John and Mary get together and do what most teenagers who fancy each other do, they start trading insults like 5 year-olds in the playground:
MARY: Don't like you. Don't like you. I don't think I like you.
You're bad. You're sad. And I know nicer boys.
JOHN: Not bothered. Not bothered. I simply am not bothered.
You're vain. A total pain. And I know sweeter girls.
Its not vintage but its sweet and simple and in character. He even manages to catch a bit of Oirishness in the odd turn of phrase: "I never flippin' did sure it was you who called me".
The problem comes with the serious stuff. Elton initially had the idea of making the whole thing a big metaphor for conflict and setting it in various locations around the world - Belgrade, Kosovo, West Bank, wherever. With some of the lyrics we're still not sure that he's settled for 1970s Northern Ireland. He's big on the general statements ("If hatred's all we're fighting for then I don't want to win") but short on the particulars of time and place that make songs memorable. The song titles don't really help. Some are hopelessly saccharine ("Let Us Love in Peace", "All the Love I Have") while others read more like scenic sub-headings ("Off to the Party", "The Happiest Day"). The result, in both the politics and the love, is a kind of plodding earnestness; well-intended but uninvolving.
Musically Lloyd Webber is up to his old tricks: a mix of catchy, soft rock and the trademark, sweeping melodies. But there's signs that his dramatic instincts are letting him down. Take the big heart-tugger of the score, “Our Kind of Love". It’s a gorgeous melody, beautifully sung by Hannah Waddingham, but sounds nothing like a care-free young girl swooning over her boyfriend and George Best's thighs. The words put up a good fight but there soon drowned underneath the bombast and by the time you get to the end, you're not really sure it was worth the effort:
People must love,
Now and forever.
There’s only one love in the end.
But its an odd thing that, in musicals, pretty much anything can be made to work so long as its in the right place. At the end of Evita the big song "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" was meant as a string of meaningless, overblown cliches that comes back to haunt Eva Peron in her demise. Something similar happens with the reprisal of "Our Kind of Love". In the finale Josie Walker belts out the cliches with all the bitter frustration of someone who has gradually seen her friends imprisoned, murdered or knee-capped. And what has she to show for it? Nothing but a handful of trite, peace-and-love truisms. Like Tony Blair's sentimental guff about "the hand of history", the soundbites aren’t enough to hide the tragedy underneath. It’s a moving moment that all too briefly brings the score to life.
Maybe it was inevitable that a West End show with all-singing, all-dancing members of the IRA would (ahem) bomb in London. And, whilst its a joy to hear a British musical that's relatively contemporary and about something distinctively British, you have to question the choice of subject matter. Elton is a funny man. He’s written funny books, funny plays, funny TV. If he and Lloyd Webber really want to try something radical, why not do a funny musical? Bring on the knob gags.
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