I’ve got another theatre show for you this week – and because has already closed I feel like I can be honest about how I feel about it without feeling like I’m being mean or potentially stopping anyone from going to see it. Which I guess is a bit of a giveaway about what is coming, but let’s maintain the facade and I’ll start with the plot.
Death Note: The Musical is based on the manga (and anime of the same name) and is the story of Light Yagami, a high school student in Tokyo who finds a Death Note – a black notebook where anyone whose name is written into it will die 40 seconds later, from a heart attack unless otherwise specified. Light has strong views about justice and decides (pretty much instantly) that he’s going to use it to rid the world of criminals who he thinks have escaped justice. The number of people dropping dead soon attracts the attention of the police who bring in the mysterious detective L to try and track down who is responsible for the biggest murder spree Japan has ever seen. There are also side plots around the Shinigami who the death note belong to and also a pop star called Mira.
I’ve been hearing about this musical for years now – which is why I went to see it. It’s been circulating in various forms for more than a decade – initially in Japan and South Korea and the first English production of it was a very successful concert performance production in London a couple of years ago and there was a lot of buzz around this when the Barbican announced it. This was also my first Frank Wildhorn musical in a theatre, having been reading about his various shows for 20 years – ie before streaming was a thing so if you wanted to hear the music in question you needed to pay £20+ for a CD of something you had no idea whether you would like or not.*
I am not familiar with the source material but the original manga ran to 12 volumes – and the anime series to nearly 40 episodes – so I suspect that there has been a considerable amount of flattening out of the plot, characters and motivations of the story to get this down to 2 hours and 40 minutes including interval. Or at least I hope there has because I found it all very one dimensional and surface level. Everything happens very quickly and characters take no time to reflect on the whys and whats of their behaviour. Not only does Light decide to start his vigilante killing spree very fast, he soon has (apparently) no qualms about killing anyone who is trying to track him down and stop him. None of this is helped by the fact that the score is also almost entirely power ballads, which start big and end big and soon lost any impact on me because of the total lack of light and shade in the music.
That said, there were things that I did like (or at least appreciate). All the performers were giving it their all and working hard with what they were given to do. My favourite performance came from Telly Leung, who I thought was great as Ryuk, the shinigami who Light’s Death Note originally belonged too – eating up every scene he was in (as well as every apple that he came across) with an enormous and hilarious performance. I thought the ambition and scale of the sets was something to behold too – even if my extreme side seat meant I probably wasn’t getting the full effect of it.
And I realise that this is probably the most down I’ve been on a show I’ve written about here, maybe ever, but I promise I have seen worse – I just haven’t written about them. Also given the massively enthusiastic reception this got in the theatre, the way it’s been selling and most of the other reviews I am an outlier here. And it’s always interesting to be an outlier. Was the fact that I’d been to see Kimberley Akimbo the previous night and loved it a factor? Who can tell but the fact remains that I’ve humming the music from Kimberly and listening to that cast recording and I couldn’t remember a tune from Death Note by the time I’d got home from the theatre.
I will be absolutely fascinated to see if this show has a life beyond this 50 performance summer run at the Barbican. From what I could judge it was definitely not a theatre crowd the night that I was there and any show that can bring in fans of the source material *and* get a 4* review from the Guardian might potentially have another life. But this is going to need a big old theatre to do it in. Much as I hope that next summer’s production of Sunday in the Park with George happens, if it doesn’t (and it feels like at this point it might not happen) I can see this getting another outing in the Barbican to replace it.
Happy Sunday.
*and for perspective, £20 at that point was more than 5 times my hourly wage at my part time job.
