STAGE REVIEW : A Charming Night With Mrs. Lloyd Webber

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music gives some people goose-bumps and other people the creeps. I liked his work through “Cats” and started to hate it with “Starlight Express.” A chance to hear his theater scores as a continuum couldn’t be passed up.

Another reason for attending “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber in Concert” Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center was to see Sarah Brightman. She is married to Lloyd Webber and played Christine in the original “Phantom of the Opera.” She also had sung the big soprano role in Lloyd Webber’s only classical work to date, his 1985 Requiem. She would present an authoritative case for her husband’s songs.

She did. Brightman’s vocal range may be wider than her emotional range, but within her limits she’s a charming musical actress. Her “Everything’s All Right” from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” for example, was simple, as opposed to dumb, and sweet, as opposed to cloying. It even swung, in its quiet way.

Brightman did not make the songs from “Song and Dance” sound any more perfunctory than they are, but she did make us see its heroine, Emma--a practical girl writing home to her Mum from such outlandish places as Beverly Hills and “Costa Mesa” (pronounced like “Costa del Sol.”)

Brightman is not ready to play Evita. “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” was sung with the proper drama, but we didn’t get the creepy feeling that Evita had by now become a figment of her own imagination. Under the ball gown, we sensed sensible shoes.

But “Cats” was right up Brightman’s alley. Instead of plugging “Memory,” as expected, Brightman concentrated on the tale of “Gus the Theatre Cat.” She sat on a stool and just told it, like a kindergarten teacher at story hour. Simple is shrewd, sometimes.

“Cats” profits from the evening’s concert format. We think of it as a costume show-- the costume show. But it’s wittier when performed in dinner jackets and cocktail dresses. Lloyd Webber’s impulse in the theater is to go for the obvious. This sequence lightly steps back from the obvious and gave the audience a little something to do.

That is the general intention of “Andrew Lloyd Webber in Concert”--to divorce his scores from scenic whizbang and see what they add up to on their own. What is “Starlight Express” without its roller-skaters? Damn little, as Lloyd Webber admits by presenting only the smallest slice of it here.

“Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” was conceived as a platform piece by Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice (who gets the proper lyricist’s credit in the program, and nothing more), and its songs survives the concert hall treatment nicely. Here, though, the dinner jackets make it hard to see these folks tending sheep. Ken Ward is Joseph, pleased as the dickens at his glitzy new coat, or rather vest.

Last comes “The Phantom of the Opera.” The show’s logo is flashed on the back wall, the lights turn orange (either in tribute to Halloween or Costa Mesa) and Michael Reed churns up his onstage orchestra like Hecate stirring supper.

It’s no go, though. Under all that storm-and-stress, “Phantom’s” score emerges as blandly as it does at the Music Center. More so, in fact, since these excerpts center on poor, dear Christine, not the most vital character in the Lloyd Webber canon.

Again, Brightman gives it her best shot, and Ward doesn’t do badly at all as the Phantom in their title duet. But, divorced from its visuals, this presentation makes it cruelly clear how little “Phantom” has going for it musically, apart from its silent-movie organ chromatics.

Which, I admit, went down as well at the Orange County Performing Arts Center Wednesday night as they have everywhere else. “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber in Concert” won’t make converts to Lloyd Webber’s cause, but it will please the faithful. Count me among the faithful departed.

Plays at 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa , Mondays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., with matinees at 2 p.m. Sunday and Nov. 18. Closes Nov. 18 (matinee). Tickets $19-$40; (213) 480-3232 or (714) 740-2000.