David Benedict

Fletcher’s music and lyrics are mostly more effective than fully affecting and are better at delivering states of mind than moving plot forward. But his comedy numbers are witty and, seized by the skilled cast, all the laughs land. And in an era where musicals too often topple over into high seriousness, the return of musical comedy is lapped up by the audience, nowhere more so than in one of the show’s highpoints, the Act Two opener.

As urgent and vital as it is, an investigation into international angles on climate change doesn’t sound remotely theatrical, let alone a race-to-the finish thriller. But that is precisely what directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin achieve with Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s strikingly smart “Kyoto.”

This is, undoubtedly, a technically flawless achievement... But dazzling though it is, there’s something faintly decadent about abandoning the depth of Rice and Lloyd Webber’s strongest achievement for a thrill-ride display.

A sound design with more clarity on the vocals than on the brassy 13-piece band band would have helped the quintet, but none of them is low on sass or killer melismas and their knowingness is the predominant attitude of director Casey Nicholaw’s (“Aladdin”) production. Laced throughout as commentators, their joyful energy kickstarts everything and they land every moment, striking poses and rising up through the floor of Dane Laffrey’s set to the audience’s delight. But the thought occurs that it takes more than hydraulics to lift a show.

“Why Am I So Single?” has arrived in the West End with no tryout in which its major structural problems could have been addressed. It’s a decision likely to prove costly. The show boasts strikingly low ticket prices with a $85 top less than half of the similarly-proportioned “Hadestown.” That may attract the target Gen-Z audience who might decide to go to a West End musical to see their lives reflected. But where “Six” long ago crossed over from the youth market to ticket-buyers of all ages, “Why Am I So Single?” riskily lacks appeal beyond its target audience.

Fein’s winning approach is to strip away anything remotely sentimental in the storytelling, which can sometimes curdle into kitsch. Far from robbing the show of emotion, it allows audiences to feel the vivid sentiment coursing throughout Joseph Stein’s book and Bock and Harnick’s beloved score.

Every iteration of the show has subtracted and added numbers to Lloyd Webber’s score. That makes sense since the show was never conceived as seriously thought-through musical drama but more as a succession of songs to create a fun-fest event about trains racing against one another to appeal to theater newcomers. This was event-theater before anyone coined the term.

The cumulative power of a still horribly recognizable journey through desperate, misplaced hope has ensured the longevity of O’Neill’s drama. Despite the unevenness of this production, Clarkson’s tender glow keeps it alive.

At the start of the second half of Ivo Van Hove’s production of his own musical version of John Cassavetes‘ ultra-Seventies backstager “Opening Night” — with music and lyrics by Rufus Wainwright — the words “the aftermath” (in fashionable lower case) appear on the large screen that dominates the stage. The trouble is, the preceding storytelling has been so muddy, and the emotional temperature of the staging so leadenly unchanging, that audiences may well be asking, “The aftermath of what?”

“We need something a little theatrical.” Boy, does excited Bob Newby (Christopher Buckley) get his wish. He’s trying to solve a staging problem in “The Dark of the Moon,” the school play he and the other kids are secretly putting on in Hawkins, Ind., in 1959. But audiences watching “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” will likely greet the line with a wry smile because immense, intense theatricality is there for all to see. Are the three plot-driven hours of virtuoso, state-of-the-art stagecraft always matched by sustained drama? Not quite. Does that matter? Not at all.

In the 85 years since its publication, du Maurier’s novel has never been out of print and Hitchcock’s 1940 movie is the rare case of a work that equals its original source. But as Ben Wheatley’s misguided 2020 Netflix movie version proved, the material is far from fail-safe. Reading the novel or revisiting Hitchcock is a far better bet than witnessing this sorry, truly astonishing attempt at re-invention.