Stage:

...I assume that Garnett is really describing his own book, perhaps not in the way he intended, for manageable flatness is about the best one can say for his tiny, tedious novel...

...his lover, a bearded transvestite...

...There are no accidental metaphors in Casino Paradise...

...Despite the somber side of Casino Paradise, I came away from it buoyed by Bolcom's music and Weinstein's words...

...this was presumably the work of David Alden, the opera director doing his first musical, who is credited with having "conceived and directed" the production...

...Anyone who knows Dynamite Tonight (we are a small but select group), the antiwar piece that Bolcom wrote to Arnold Weinstein's libretto in the 1960s, expects their satire to be convoluted...

...The elephants-little elephants this time-are back in Lloyd Webber's latest presold musical investment package, Aspects of Love...

...There is no room for elephants on Philadelphia's tiny Plays & Players stage, but Philipp Jung (scenery) and Heather Carson (lights) managed to suggest the building of the casino in the limited space, even allowing us to watch it burn at the end...

...It was presumably ignorance not wit that named Trump's Taj after a mausoleum, but the makers of the musical understand the connection between glitz and decay...

...LITTLE ELEPHANTS 'CASINO PARADISE' & 'ASPECTS OF LOVE' When The Phantom of the Opera was new to Broadway, the New York Times (January 28, 1988) asked a number of composers and performers to comment on Andrew Lloyd Webber's score...

...At one point the top does lift off an alp to provide a change of perspective, a device that was greeted with surprise and pleasure by those members of the audience who did not simply laugh at the foolishness of it...

...the local news shows, pandering to Trump, were more outrageous than the Bolcom-Weinstein TV commentator who shills for the casino...

...his father who hates what he has created but does not want to let go...

...The real irony has nothing to do with the theme of Aspects of Love, but with the fact that the show, without a roller-skating engine or a falling chandelier, has an $11-million advance sale, while Casino Paradise, so much more alive, has played its limited run and retired to the wings waiting for a new production to rescue it...

...In the second act, the soured idealist son, who shot his father in act 1 and still failed to stop the casino, had found a new role-real son of his father...

...The elephantine elements in Aspects of Love are minimal...

...When the show slows down for a quiet number-say, the sextet "When You're in Love"-the singers, most of them playing nonlovers, color the song itself, making it less a restful moment than a jumping-off place for the final disaster...

...Since the show opened the same week that Donald Trump's Taj Mahal did in Atlantic City, direct satire would have been lost...

...a mysterious nurse who is an angel of mercy or death or money...

...There was constant movement, as one scene melted into another, one song swallowed the next...

...In the circus," Bolcom said, "you want just the right music for the elephants, but it's the elephants you're meant to watch...

...These are not technicians in business for themselves, using Bolcom's music to decorate their inventions...

...It is followed by a reprise of "Casino Paradise," the hard-sell song from act 1 which has now become dark, ugly, painful...

...Back together again for Casino Paradise (with a little help from Thomas Babe), they have taken on power, its fascination and its destructiveness, in a fable about a man who wrecks a beach community to build the titular pleasure palace...

...But in his flat way he does seem to be able to deal with delicate and complex emotions, and to be able to reduce them to manageable proportions...

...For the most part, the focus is small, keeping to the handful of characters whose shifting love relations are supposed to fill us with a sense of the sadness, the sweetness, the irony of it all...

...Fittingly, on the night it opened at the Broadhurst, William Bolcom's latest theater piece, Casino Paradise, opened in Philadelphia, the first offering of the 1990 American Music Theater Festival...

...Some were scathing (Ned Rorem: "the chutzpah's turned into commerce, and the corn into smarm"), but William Bolcom was almost congenial as he described Lloyd Webber as the creator of a kind of English Italianate opera in which the music is in the service of the total show, the score interesting only as accompaniment to theatrical effects...

...The producer (Lloyd Webber under another hat) deserves some kind of reaction for the $8 million the show has cost...

...Although this born-again buccaneer is at the center of what Alden calls a "more discursive" act, he shares space with his sister who has bought a husband...

...GERALD WEALESGERALD WEALES...

...Lloyd Webber, whose book follows the original carefully, has achieved a similar tone in his score...

...There is an underlay of too obvious psychology in the piece ("I Do Not Hate My Father," sings the idealist in act 1), but the final declaration of mutual love between the son and the dying father is more than a pop-psychology variation of the doomed-lovers opera finale...

...Contrariwise, I dragged out of the Broadhurst, weighed down by the leadenness of Lloyd Webber's book and music...

...The first act really belongs to the gangster-entrepreneur, a ruthlessly likable Irish con man, as Timothy Nolan played him, seducing the small business people by tickling their own greed...

...There is probably more going on in this act than the work can comfortably sustain, but Bolcom and Weinstein want the corruption to go beyond the beachfront to take in the family and society as a whole...

...Bolcom's score is the driving force of the show, carrying the audience toward what Alden calls "a Verdi-like ending" (Philadelphia Inquirer, April 1...

...In David Garnett's novel on which the musical is based, George's poetry (he is a painter in the musical) is described as "not at all technically exciting...