'Death Note: The Musical' review — Frank Wildhorn's manga musical is a killer spectacle

Read our review of Death Note: The Musical, with music by Frank Wildhorn, now in performances at the Barbican through 12 September.

Summary

• Death Note: The Musical is adapted for the stage from the hugely popular manga series
• The cast includes Xander Pang; Colin Ryan; Grace Mouat and Telly Leung
• Performances continue at the Barbican through September

Composer Frank Wildhorn is quickly developing a reputation as the master of bringing manga musicals to Western audiences. In 2024, he lent his talents to the devastatingly touching Your Lie in April about a piano prodigy who falls in love with music again after meeting a talented violinist. Now he, and a creative team including lyricist Jack Murphy, book writer Ivan Menchell, and director Stephen Whitson, are staging the first fully fledged English-language production of hugely popular manga, Death Note: The Musical, at the Barbican.

They will no doubt be looking for the same success enjoyed by another Japanese import — the staged version of anime My Neighbour Totoro — which broke box-office records at the London venue in 2022. Where that production soared in honouring the original film’s childlike sense of wonder and magic, Death Note has a bigger challenge in translating a dense, 12-volume manga to the stage.

The premise is simple: disillusioned student Light Yagami is frustrated by the lack of justice in society, so when the bored Shinigami (a “death spirit”), Ryuk, drops a Death Note into the human world — allowing its new owner the opportunity to kill in 40 seconds, as long as they know the real name and face of their victim — Light sees a chance to rid the world of its evil. When he takes this new god-given power to extremes, becoming “Kira” (killer), he is pursued by the genius detective mysteriously named “L”, and the pair become locked in a game of cat and mouse.

The creative team have made huge cuts to the original manga, merging some characters and axing others including Light’s mother Sachiko, as well as plot developments such as the Yotsuba arc, in which Light and L team up to bring down the third Kira. While some streamlining is not only inevitable but necessary (and, on the whole, Menchall does a good job of condensing an unwieldy plot), some of the character development is confusing. The friendship that supposedly develops between L and Light doesn’t ring true without more of their shared history, while L’s discoveries about the case often feel like they’ve been plucked from the air.

The visuals, however, are knockout. Colin Ryan’s L most closely resembles his original manga character, with wide eyes as big as saucers, wild hair, and hunched posture, often crouching (he explains that he loses 40% of his deductive reasoning if he sits normally). He brings unsettling intensity to L from the very beginning, as Fabian Aloise’s tightly choreographed ensemble body pop in hoodies in the thrilling number “The Game Begins”, but stylistically his characterisation departs from the rest of the cast.

As Light’s power grows, Xander Pang loses any school-boy awkwardness, transforming into a cruel and unstable presence on stage, and impressing in Act One’s penultimate number “Hurricane” when he sends a group of FBI agents to their death in a viscerally charged scene, aided by Jen Schriever’s lighting design.

Breakout star Stephanie Zaharis is magnetic as the K-Pop styled singer Misa, who is reminiscent of Ariana Grande with her legions of devoted fans and swinging ponytail. Wildhorn’s skills as a musical theatre and pop writer comes to the fore in her back-to-back numbers “I’m Ready” (complete with designer Sachiko Nakahara’s fun boxing costumes) and “We All Need a Hero”.

Broadway’s Telly Leung offers some camp light relief as the mischievous Shinigami Ryuk, who plays with humans for his own amusement and devours apples at a rapid pace. His costume and make-up are far less terrifying than in the concert version at the London Palladium in 2023 (which more faithfully recreated the manga), though Nakahara’s exposed, black rib-cage design is imaginative. Grace Mouat, as the death spirit Rem (Ryuk’s foil in white), is heartbreaking in the ballad “When Love Comes”, when she sacrifices herself for a human.

Jon Bausor’s striking set uses a platform to separate the gods from the humans, which doubles as gritty architecture for Tokyo’s skyline. Video designer Akhila Krishnan’s flickering projections of neon lights and rain evocatively capture a sense of place, helping to pull together a stylish production that is dressed to kill.

Book Death Note: The Musical tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Xander Pang and the cast of Death Note. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)