YMMV / Aspects of Love

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Rose for George and Vincent/Hugo for Rose: cases of Has a Type or Replacement Goldfish for George's late wife Delia and Alex respectively? Neither play nor novella make it clear.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: A musical about open marriage, bisexuality, incest, and borderline statutory rape is going to be a hard sell to any audience. It isn't all that surprising that more conservative American audiences in the 1980s didn't warm to it.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The first thing the audience sees is George's funeral, at which a cynical, sadder-but-wiser Alex has ended up paired with Guilietta. Now that we already know the Downer Ending, we spend the next two hours finding out that it is the result of a bunch of amoral mid-century bohemians selfishly ruining each other's lives over the course of twenty years, and that it could very easily have turned out a lot worse for all of them.
• Tough Act to Follow: As Lloyd Webber's first show after The Phantom of the Opera, it tends to be overshadowed.
• Values Dissonance: Jenny's Precocious Crush on Alex was arguably far less controversial when the original novella was published in 1955 than in the late 1980s. This likely contributed to Jenny's Age Lift from 13 to 15 at the show's end.
  • Her age was then put up to 18 for the 2023 West-End revival.