I guess that does bring the discussion to a close though. Thanks, Hans - it's been fun!

Yeah, I couldn't find any way to continue other than rephrasing and elaborating what I feel I've already expressed. It was fun - more of this sort of discussion at MdN! Yay!

So it turns out that The Woman in White will be revised by the end of this year into a new chamber version that uses a cast of 9 or 10. Apparently, the last third of the show will be reworked, with some new material but no new major numbers.

I need to find some time to sit with this show again....

I think that, unlike Aspects, there is not a small nice show hidden within Woman in White. The whole thing is lazily written, and ALW has even admitted he wrote it only because he was bored. One can detect that he must have enjoyed writing Love Never Dies more.

Despite not having the sense of easy melody and lush orchestral depth that Love Never Dies appears to offer, I think that The Woman in White does a fair bit musically that is right and quite interesting. It's the book, such as it is, and lyrics that let it down and I get the feeling that with stronger collaborators than Charlotte Jones and David Zippel, the problems that do indeed crop up in the music might have been avoided too. One thing I do agree with is that I don't think that The Woman in White should be a small show. It is almost pure melodrama with a score that is a direct musical theatre offshoot of what Benjamin Britten did in his operas and I think the production thereof should be big and grandiose - the same way that I think Sweeney Todd should be big and grandiose. (The more I think about it, the more I dislike John Doyle's small scale actor-musician approach to that Sondheim show.) What a show The Woman in White might have been had there been a director like Harold Prince who - in his best productions - seems to have offered as much insight into the creation of the shows on which he has worked as he did into the staging of them.

I'm sorry if came through that way, but the largeness of TWIW is not what I object to. I agree there are some good tunes there, but they drown in the book problems and the awful lyrics. I also think that in lack of real dramaturgic tension and suspense, ALW put as much "suspenseful" dissonace as he managed into the music. The result is that it sounds cheap, as if insisting that this is really mysterious and suspicious, despite the unmysteriousness and unsuspiciousness of the book and the lyrics.

By the waym I just saw a small scale production of Sweeney, and despite several flaws, it was marvellous, about the best I have seen in Norway (which is on par with the four shows I've seen at all in the West End and on Broadway combined).