Sex, Scandal and a Songsmith

THEATER REVIEW

Nobby Clark

A scene in ‘‘Stephen Ward’’ at the Aldwych Theater in London.

By MATT WOLF

LONDON — “Who was Stephen Ward?” Numerous people have asked me the question ever since it was announced that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first musical in almost four years would bear the name of the British osteopath who found himself at the center of a scandal that helped topple a government a half-century ago.

Let’s just say to start with that he’s another biographical figure drawn from Mr. Lloyd Webber’s capacious array to date. And as he did with Eva Perón (in “Evita”) and Jesus Christ (in “Jesus Christ Superstar”) before, Mr. Lloyd Webber may have wanted to ignite a provocative historical fuse here, too. But if that’s the case, he and his colleagues need to burrow far more deeply into the abbreviated life of the actual Stephen Ward than the musical that opened last week at the Aldwych Theater ever manages.

With a list of patients that included Ava Gardner, Winston Churchill and Gandhi, the socialite-doctor moved in the elevated circles of the fast-living in 1960s’ London. That life included leasing a cottage on the grounds of the Astor family’s elegant estate west of the city. It was there by the pool that Ward introduced Christine Keeler, a showgirl some 30 years his junior, to the war minister, John Profumo, and their affair ensued.

Ms. Keeler’s simultaneous dalliance with a Russian naval attaché and spy by the name of Yevgeny Ivanov only further amplified a political conflagration that resulted in the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and the loss of power for the Conservatives, with Ward the hapless fall guy at the suicidal epicenter of it all. (Ward was found guilty of living off the profits of “immoral earnings,” or prostitution, but died of an overdose in August 1963, age 50, before his trial had ended.)

So far so juicy, you might think, except that the musical fashioned from this tale of high spirits brought balefully low isn’t actually very interested in letting the swinging ’60s swing (a number early on involving hula hoops notwithstanding).

Instead, Mr. Lloyd Webber and his collaborators — who include Don Black and Christopher Hampton, the book writers and lyricists for his “Sunset Boulevard,” and Richard Eyre, directing his first Lloyd Webber musical — view Ward as a symbol first and a person only a very distant second. That, in turn, may explain why the show that bears his name proves largely unilluminating about hi m: Once you’ve acknowledged that Ward was a scapegoat for the social and sexual depredations of the day, you’ve more or less made your point.

Mr. Lloyd Webber’s Ward, in the vigorously sung form of the show’s capable star, Alexander Hanson, is first seen stepping forward from the same waxworks exhibition to which the show returns him at the end. Mr. Hanson’s solo song, “Human Sacrifice,” posits Ward as an unwilling victim of the age even as the CliffsNotes-style canter through his life that follows raises more questions than it begins to answer.

Who (or what) was Stephen Ward in reality: pimp? voyeur? gadfly? gay? (On that last front, it’s worth noting that Ms. Keeler’s relationship with her mentor-of-sorts was by all accounts platonic.) The musical isn’t saying, perhaps out of deference to a man who on this evidence was hounded enough without needing an innuendo-laden stage show to complicate his legacy further.

Nor, for all the sexual byplay at its core, is the material itself at all sexy, the prevailing tone defined not by rampant eroticism but by a first-act orgy and accompanying song (“You’ve Never Had It So Good,” the title taken from the political catch-phrase of the day) that rhymes “S-and-M” with “one of them”; the rest of the number, with its various nods towards “The Art of the Possible” from “Evita” and the “Ascot Gavotte” from “My Fair Lady” is best left without comment. Let’s just say that if this were an Alan Ayckbourn play, the labored bawdiness and sagging (and naked) flesh on display might be intended as satiric. On this occasion, no such luck.

It doesn’t help that neither Charlotte Spencer’s Keeler nor Charlotte Blackledge as her crony Mandy Rice-Davies can soften a governing shrillness that makes you wonder at times what Ward saw in two such women, both of whom are still alive. (The likes of Profumo were presumably dazzled merely by their curves.) And it seems symptomatic of a coarseness to the staging as a whole that their closing first-act duet, “1963,” sounds bouncier and less tinny in an extant promotional YouTube clip than it did at a critics’ preview. (The song itself, one of the show’s better ones, could have come from a period-perfect British rewrite of “Bye Bye Birdie.”)

Far more engaging is the wonderful Joanna Riding (Julie in the National’s celebrated “Carousel”) in what amounts to a one-song role as Profumo’s wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, who stuck by her husband during the brouhaha and well beyond. Her second-act solo, an aggrieved confessional called “I’m Hopeless When It Comes To You,” would be more effective if it didn’t feel like an awkwardly integrated afterthought.

Elsewhere, one is left pondering the ways in which “Stephen Ward” links up to the canon of its songwriter, or not. Those who are weary of the scenic excess of Mr. Lloyd Webber’s era-defining hits may be contrastingly dismayed by the cheap-seeming feel to a design whose gaudy circular curtains whoosh this way and that and whose projections don’t come into focus very much more sharply than the material does.

Chroniclers of such things will note a second Lloyd Webber musical (following “Sunset Boulevard”) to feature a narrator who happens to be dead as well as a second musical from Mr. Eyre (following his winning 2011 “Betty Blue Eyes”) to have a song that tells of bodily manipulations — chiropody in that show, osteopathy and back massage here.

But those awaiting this composer’s trademark cri de coeur, complete with a full-throated money note deployed ringingly by Mr. Hanson, will find it in Ward’s climactic solo, “Too Close to the Flame,” which trades in all manner of generic imagery without getting us any closer to the subject than we were at the start.

Stephen Ward. Directed by Richard Eyre. Aldwych Theatre. Open-ended run.

	Nobby Clark Alexander Hanson as Stephen Ward and Charlotte Blackledge as Mandy Rice-Davies. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/arts/international/26iht-Sex-Scandal-and-a-Songsmith.html?pagewanted=2