This dire manga musical made me feel sorry for the performers
This dire manga musical made me feel sorry for the performers
Tim RobeyWed, August 12, 2026 at 2:30 PM UTC
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Xander Pang plays schoolboy Light Turner - Manuel Harlan
Based on the wildly popular Japanese manga series, Death Note: The Musical crash-lands at the Barbican – not so much souped-up as dead on arrival. Not a single one of the 27 belted-out songs has the power to resurrect it. The show enjoyed a successful iteration in Tokyo and Seoul a decade ago, but this is its first fully staged English-language run. Even though the book (Ivan Menchell), lyrics (Jack Murphy) and score (Frank Wildhorn) were written by Americans, something, somewhere has been lost in translation. Even fathoming why it’s a musical at all is beyond me.
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s original set of comics, which ran from 2003 to 2006, rapidly entered the global zeitgeist and sold more than 30 million copies. Death Note has since been adapted into an anime series, a bunch of video games and Japanese films, and a critically panned 2017 US adaptation on Netflix.
The concept revolves around a magical notebook, handed down by divine forces to a schoolboy called Light Turner. A swift death will follow anyone whose name is written into it. Light, a legal student here who finds the justice system despicably lax and corrupt, sets to work using his pen to rid society of suspected criminals, adopting the pseudonym “Kira” when he becomes a Batman-style folk hero.
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s original comics ran from 2003 to 2006 - IMDB
As played on stage by Singaporean actor Xander Pang, he’s ostensibly our identification figure, but not for long in this emotion-free, concept-driven, crashingly hollow moral fable. Even before the interval, he’s on a manic power trip, scribbling down the names of FBI agents (in an Asian metropolis, nonsensically) who might halt his killing spree. Vigilantism – guess what? – is corrosive to the soul. It doesn’t get any subtler from there.
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Pitted against Kira is a mysterious hacker-detective known only as L (Colin Ryan), who gyrates wild-eyed in a baggy white sweater, crouching in chairs with knees up to his chest: he claims this improves his deductive reasoning, but the manga illustrators obviously just thought it looked cool. The “Shinigami” or “death spirit” played by Telly Leung, who pops up to Kira’s eyes only, has the vibe of Beetlejuice if he was crashing the sets of The Hunger Games, with ill-defined powers and no better tunes than anyone else.
Jon Bausor’s imposing stage design, with a giant concrete cube tilted overhead, is the one aspect of the evening that comes off at all well, excluding the Matrix cliché of green “digital rain” tumbling down whenever L is data-mining. You’d be hard pressed to send this music anywhere other than the bin: it serves up tranche after tranche of undifferentiated rock-opera sludge, with rudimentary lyrics, and far too many songs that run in circles getting the story nowhere. I can’t feel bad for the writers, but I do for the musically capable performers dragged into this abyss.
Until Sept 12; barbican.org.uk
Book ticketsvia Tickets | Telegraph Media Group provided by London Theatre Direct
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
