STAGE REVIEW : Brightman Enhances Lloyd Webber’s ‘Music’

There are two reasons why fans of the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber owe themselves a trip to the Shubert Theatre. The first is the composer’s wife, soprano Sarah Brightman. The second is the uncommon chance to hear the composer’s music delivered unadorned--without garbage dumps, ascending rings of light, crashing chandeliers, steamy underground lakes or skating rinks.

Lloyd Webber haters may as well stay away because “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” at the Shubert offers just that: selections from the composer’s work, mostly the mega-hits, presented in concert, which means divorced from superspectacle and seven-digit special effects.

For size (what is Lloyd Webber’s music without size?), there is the support of a fine 70-piece orchestra under the baton of Michael Reed. For context, there is an able chorus of 12. But by any definition, this is a recital, and its centerpiece is Sarah Brightman.

Even inveterate skeptics may be surprised by the sweep of the music in its naked state. And the high, clear tones of Brightman’s reedy modulations only enhance the directness.

We are primed by the chorus on short excerpts from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Starlight Express” (a very short excerpt) and that “Pop Oratorio for School Children,” “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” the earliest collaboration between Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice. We don’t get Brightman until well into the first half. When we do, she is as unexpected as the “Unexpected Song” that she sings (from “Song and Dance,” a show that never made it to the West Coast). With her green eyes at half mast, and dressed in what looks like the facsimile of an orange Bedouin gown, Brightman takes possession of the stage with a deceptive languor, refusing to rush or be rushed.

When she sings, the voice is pure and powerful, as comfortable with the humor of “Capped Teeth and Caesar Salad” or the intimacy of “The Last Man in My Life” (both also from “Song and Dance”) as she is with the tender lyricism of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (“Jesus Christ Superstar”), the oddities of “Evita’s” “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (a song whose lyrics have yet to make any sense) or the lost-little-girl mood of “Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” also from “Evita.”

Brightman may be a limited actress (the “behavior” here looks a bit too studied), but she is becoming a singer to reckon with, projecting inner grace accompanied by the delicately sensuous motions of a dancer. She’s fully at home on stage and comfortable addressing her audience. Even when what she has been given to say is nothing more than nondescript connective chatter, she knows how to keep it simple and direct.

It is in the evening’s second half, however, that she shines brightest, in excerpts from “The Phantom of the Opera,” the show that is hers by droit de seigneur, so to speak, since the role of Christine in “Phantom” was written for her. We also get limpid versions of all the standards: “Think of Me,” “All I Ask of You,” “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” and of course “The Music of the Night”--a song, as she explains, first written privately for her by Lloyd Webber and later given to the Phantom in “Phantom.”

She reclaims it here with an interpretation so exquisitely sensual that it’s difficult not to feel voyeuristic watching it, the thin arms, slightly receding chin and apple cheeks lending the song visible as well as aural vulnerability.

There are a few encores at the end of the program, including, on Wednesday night’s opening, “Love Changes Everything,” the most popular song from Lloyd Webber’s latest musical, “Aspects of Love,” and, in this context, prophetic.

It completes a comprehensive visit with the Lloyd Webbers that hints at separate scopes for their abilities and, unexpectedly, at their autonomies within the marriage.

An unusual match.

At 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City, Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until Jan. 7. Tickets: $35 to $60; (800) 233-3123.