I first encountered Aspects of Loveas a musical at the Broadhurst, and the experience left me with such unusual questions that I found myself on the trail of an enigma, like the hero of a detective story. The musical, adapted from a 1955 novella by a minor Bloomsburyite, tracks five people in France from 1947 to 1964: a French actress, an elderly English painter, his soldier nephew, an Italian sculptress, and, in the last years, the adolescent daughter of the painter and the actress. These characters engage in a bewildering merry-go-round of affairs and near-affairs, clumsily and jerkily presented. Narrative coherence seems less important, however, on stage than the unremitting attempts to establish that we are in a sophisticated, “artistic” ambience. Dialogue worthy (or perhaps unworthy) of Judith Krantz bombards us: “That’s my only genuine Matisse” . . . “She’s off to make a madcap movie with Monsieur Cocteau” . . . “I met him in Harry’s Bar” . . . “Coffee and croissant?” A Parisian exhibition of chic sculpture is suggested by a Daliesque lip-shaped sofa and a ceiling hung with giant gloves. And by way of psychology and philosophy, everyone exchanges pellets of psychobabble about how we mustn’t waste today and how love is like champagne and how human nature must be accepted for what it is and how death is a carnival. But this boulevard wisdom is as often forgotten on stage: one character shoots another; there are at least two heart attacks (one fatal) brought