It's been a much-loved manga and a much-loathed film, now Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's
Death Note becomes a dynamic, tragicomic stage show. Frank Wildhorn (music,) Ivan Menchell (book) and Jack Murphy's (lyrics) musical adaptation debuted in Japan in 2015 and has had a concert production in London before, but Stephen Whitson's production now gives the fully-staged treatment to the story of a very right-wing teenager who gets to live out his fantasies of being judge, jury and executioner: When Ryuk (Telly Leung,) a Shinigami - a chaotic death god - gets bored of handing out death sentences to random humans, he deliberately misplaces his magic book in the mortal world to see who will pick it up. The Death Note ends up in the hands of Light Yagami (Xander Pang,) a schoolboy with an alarmingly right-wing attitude towards social justice.
