I’m no great fan of what can loosely be called the Les Miz style: the bloated score with great hunks of plot and exposition sung in recitative, the large chorus muttering ominously, the cumbersome and overdesigned scenery, the Pucciniesque penchant for high-volume wailing and howling. I was more than a little suspicious, then, of the new musical version of A Tale of Two Cities, especially on learning that it is more or less the offspring of Les Misérables. Its subject matter—high drama and epic history during the French Revolution—is echt-Lloyd Webber; its producers, Barbara Russell and Ron Sharpe, met while performing in Les Miz; its current cast contains nine Les Miz alums. The author and composer Jill Santoriello has produced a score which is all too obviously derivative of Lloyd Webber’s signature style, and a book without much wit or originality. And the set designer Tony Walton, old and experienced enough to have known better, has created a set which in awkwardness and complexity rivals anything perpetrated by John Napier (Les Miz) or Maria Björnson (Phantom of the Opera).

Nevertheless I found myself thoroughly enjoying the show, and the audience seemed to be having as good a time as I was. What made it click? Principally, I think, it’s that A Tale of Two Citiesis just such a wonderful story. Not that it’s one of Dickens’s best novels—as fiction it is certainly one of his less successful efforts—but just as