In the field of musicals, it's a case of one step forward, two steps back. Just when The Witches of Eastwick and The Beautiful Game seemed to herald a return to book-shows with a biting plot, along comes this through-composed piece of historical tosh that already looks old-fashioned. Its only redeeming features are Francesca Zambello's effortlessly fluid production and Michael Yeargan's elegant designs.
John Julius Norwich expresses surprise in the programme that Napoleon has never been the subject of an opera or musical before. Discounting Prokofiev's War and Peace, in which he makes a highly dramatic appearance, he has actually been the hero of Austrian, French, Italian and even Broadway musicals. If none of them has endured, the reason is fairly obvious - how do you encompass his turbulent rise from Corsican outsider to consul and emperor, and how do you present the sea of blood through which he waded in over 40 battles? Dreams of unending conquest are hardly ideal musical matter unless you're going to do a bad-taste equivalent of Springtime for Hitler in Germany.
Andrew Sabiston (book and lyrics) and Tim Williams (book and music) get round the problem by suggesting that Napoleon was really a romantic lover at heart. They whisk us breathlessly from Paris in 1794 to Waterloo in 1815, showing Napoleon moving from idealistic revolutionary to failing conqueror all the time manipulated by Talleyrand. But, in their view, he was really driven by his passionate love for Josephine so that even at the moment of his military downfall he has time for a visionary duet with her in which they jointly sing, "I need you, I can't live without you".
The effect is simply to reduce Napoleon to a Tussaud's hero who realises too late in the day that military conquest is nothing without the love of a good woman. The one truly interesting character in the whole piece is the politically scheming Talleyrand, whom David Burt endows with a limp and a lethal smile that suggests he breakfasts off iron filings. At first brushing the arriviste Napoleon aside with a Thacherite cry of, "You're not one of us", he backs him when he wins and jettisons him when he loses. Talleyrand, you ject of the show, though he would stillfeel, should have been the sub have had to contend with Williams's unmemorable, film-score music and Sabiston's stupefyingly dull lyrics.
Zambello's production alone makes the show worth watching. As in her Covent Garden Billy Budd, she makes striking use of a tilted, rising stage in the battle scenes and, with the help of Yeargan's stylish projections, conjures up some beautiful tableaux: Napoleon's coronation at Notre Dame, with scarlet costumes set against the sun-bright cathedral, even suggests Lyceum Theatre spectacle in Irving's heyday.
But neither Paul Baker as the impassioned Bonaparte nor Anastasia Barzee as Josephine can do much to lift the characters above the level of ciphers. This is cartoon-history with permanent musical accompaniment that leaves you both emotionally and intellectually unstirred.
Booking until January 6. Box office: 020-7379 5399.
