It is, by any sensible reckoning, sentimental dreck. Yet who needs sensible reckonings when you’ve got doomed teenage love served up by such a spirited and skilled cast — every one of them, for the first time on the West End stage, of southeast Asian descent?
Who cares if the psychologising is pound shop and the songs sound like rejected items from an Eighties AOR anthems playlist? When it all keeps moving forward so relentlessly, when its hero’s pain is eventually made palpable by a leading man doing a live classical recital on the revolving piano that sits centre stage, there are more important things than critical faculties. Let’s have tragic fun instead.
Your Lie in April started life in Japan in 2011 as a manga comic that has gone on to sell 7.5 million copies. It has since become an anime TV series, a live-action film and now this musical, first seen in Tokyo in 2022. It’s predictable, American-accented, and easy to consume at every hokey turn.
Its music tries to soar, the story tries for delicacy. Kosei is a teenage piano prodigy who as a young lad once wished his demanding mother dead. She promptly died. Now his lingering trauma means he can no longer hear his virtuoso tinkling when he plays. But then he meets lovely young violinist Kaori … can he find his way back to music? Has he found love? Oh dear, only if the poorly Kaori can make it to the show’s last power ballad in one piece.
Formulas are formulas because they work. The book by Rinne Groff, from a Japanese book by Riki Sakaguchi, closely based on Naoshi Arakawa’s original, is too streamlined to resist for long. The music, by Frank Wildhorn, is propulsive rather than distinctive, which is good because otherwise it might show up lyrics, by Tracy Miller and Carly Robyn Green, that aren’t above rhyming “start” with “heart” and “sky” with “goodbye” if it means the sad story keeps moving forward at a lick.
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A fine cast serve it up sincerely, but with a twinkle. Mia Kobayashi throws everything at the role of the smiling, suffering Kaori, who sings with effortlessly sweet power in her first professional role. Zheng Xi Yong, as Kosei, exudes exactly the right kind of beta-male, alpha-nerd, never-say-die obduracy. His unaccompanied piano playing helps to take the second half somewhere tender. That boosts Nick Winston’s production, unfolding on a characterful, cherry-blossom-adorned set (by Justin Williams) that is admittedly a little crammed in on this stage.
Buyer beware: it’s a cheesefest from start to finish. What can I say, though? Sometimes a platter of cheese is just what you fancy.
★★★☆☆
145min
To September 21, yourlieinapril.co.uk
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