Death Note the Musical has finally reached a full production at the Barbican after 11 years, and it's baffling that no one noticed its deficiencies in plot and score. The story of a Tokyo cop chasing a vigilante who supernaturally kills criminals is a mixture of mumbo-jumbo, crime-story cliche and anodyne teen wish-fulfilment.
Musical and Production Flaws
Frank Wildhorn's compositions alternate between pop-rock anthems and mopey ballads. Stephen Whitson's heavy-handed production is full of brutish air-clawing choreography and wooden exposition. Jack Murphy's lyrics are terrible, and Ivan Menchell's dialogue is hackneyed.
Novel Territory and Cast
Admittedly, Death Note carves out novel territory, stylistically and thematically, for a London musical, and is unusual in featuring a large and young cast of Asian heritage, some of whom have fine voices. The enthusiastic audience at the performance I saw – several of them in cosplay – were also more youthful and far less homogeneous than most UK audiences.
Plot and Characters
The title refers to notebooks in which the Shinagami, capricious gods of death, write the names of humans whose lives they choose to curtail. One of them is bored Ryuk, played by US musical theatre star Telly Leung, dressed as a fire-damaged Edward Scissorhands. He lets his book fall into the possession of high school student Light (Xander Pang), a police chief's son full of rage about rampant criminality and injustice.
Light embarks on a scribbling killing spree with the obsessively apple-noshing Ryuk as his mocking Mephistopheles, becoming a folk hero nicknamed "Kira". The helpless police turn to a bug-eyed, neurodiverse, college-age sleuth known only as L (Colin Ryan), who decodes Kira's identity from scrolling green streams of Matrix-style data. Pop star Misa (Stephanie Zaharis), a child of murdered parents, platonically worships Kira, and she acquires a death notebook of her own.
Production and Performances
It's mounted by Whitson on a largely bare stage, with bland office sets shunted on from the sides, a gantry above patrolled by the three gods, and screens showing news reports and a rainy Tokyo skyscape. With an ensemble of 26 and a ten-strong band there's a teeming liveliness to the evening, and a distinctive, flat, comic-book sensibility. Fabian Aloise's choreography has striking moments but it's a pale shadow of the movement he created for Jamie Lloyd shows including Evita and Sunset Blvd.
Pang is arrogantly bland as Light, while Ryan at least sings charismatically as the extravagantly strange L. Relative newcomer Zaharis impresses as the love interest in a wilfully sexless show. Grace Mouat as the Shinagawa Rem powerfully holds the stage for When Love Comes, the only song that stayed with me. The original manga series by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata has shifted over 30m units worldwide. Hardcore devotees in the UK will probably lap up this new iteration, while the rest of us look on, perplexed. To 12 Sept, barbican.org.uk.
