Maybe it’s lost something in translation but this emotionally overwrought Japanese musical, based on a popular manga series by Naoshi Arakawa, strikes me as absurd. A tragic love story between two high school music prodigies, it’s glib, mawkish and riddled with clichés.
Even the set is a trite collage of Japanese screens, cherry blossom and a wooden bridge, centred around a rotating grand piano, the lid of which opens in moments of high drama like a gaping Muppet mouth of doom.
Frank Wildhorn’s score is dominated by gushy, eyes-aloft, mouth-agape anthems full of flying metaphors, punctuated by jokey numbers. The words for the English version sound like they were devised by a particularly basic form of ChatGPT. “We don’t need a rocket: our legs can be the rocket,” is an example of the dialogue. “Watching piano keys go up and down/Your music flew above the train into town,” gives you an idea of the lyrics’ inanity.
Zheng Xi Yong’s classical piano playing in the lead role of Kо̄sei provides subtlety and real feeling in a welter of phony sentiment. Both he and Mia Kobayashi, making a bold debut as his inamorata Kaori though still at drama school, sing strongly. But the acting in Nick Winston’s production – the first West End musical with a cast entirely of South East Asian heritage – is relentlessly cartoonish.
We first meet Kо̄sei enjoying bants with tomboyish Tsubaki (Rachel Clare Chan) and swaggering jock Watari (Dean John Wilson). Pretty violinist Kaori arrives and declares she has a crush on Watari, which sends a ripple of jealousy through the other two. But this is no simple, PG-rated love rectangle.
Kosei was trained to be the perfect pianist, a “human metronome”, by his terminally ill, dictatorial mother (Lucy Park, limping around like Captain Ahab’s angrier sister). He stopped playing, unable to hear his piano, when she died after an argument between them. Kaori cajoles him back to the keys to temper her more expressive playing in competitions officiated by perpetually furious judges.
But wait for it – she also has an unspecified disorder that can only be cured by a very, very risky operation that coincides with his comeback concert. Oh no, what are the chances?
Anger, grief and anxiety are turned up to 11 for the most OTT songs before the tone slips back to the gurgling, simpering comedy of a teen sitcom. The title turns out to refer to an act of benign untruthfulness so staggeringly implausible it almost prolapsed my brain.
Riko Sakaguchi and Broadway composer Wildhorn adapted the story for the Tokyo stage in 2017: the book for this English version is by Rinne B Groff, the lyrics by Tracy Miller and Carly Robyn Green.
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Presumably all concerned looked at the resulting mess and thought they had an international winner to match the relative success of My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away in London. Their Misapprehension in July, I fear.
Harold Pinter Theatre, to September 21; buy tickets here
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