Blood Brothers’s plot, concerning a working-class woman who gives up one her sons only to see the two become friends, rivals, and, finally, brothers again in tragedy, is the kind of penny-dreadful that’s so melodramatic, it’s nearly farcical. If only author Willy Russell had gone in that direction. Instead, his lighter moments are incidental throwaways in a musical that wallows in portentous hooey. There’s even a somber narrator who strides on every five minutes to deliver some cautionary doggerel -- complete with ominous musical underscoring. Ooohh. Then again, this bad poetry is positively Byronic compared to Russell’s lyrics, which rhyme “whine” with “eye” and “never” with “constant as the changing weather” -- whatever the heck that means.
Some occasionally effective lip service is given to England’s unbalanced class structure (e.g., a policeman’s radically different handling of each twin’s juvenile delinquency), and, although there’s way too much of it, the youngsters have nice coming-of-age stuff.
Still, seeing this a few hours after The Who’s Tommy is like following Kubrick’s "2001" with an Amy Fisher telemovie. I don’t care how many years it’s been running in London; Blood Brothers is one long string of tripe.
