The winning streak is back. After the unusual bum note of its last offering, Paradise Found, the Chocolate Factory is once more doing what it does best, re-imagining musicals on an intimate and rewarding scale.

Glorious recent productions of La Cage aux Folles and A Little Night Music have gone on to conquer the West End and Broadway, and it’s not hard to imagine Aspects beating a deserved and similar path. The critical reaction to the 1989 West End premiere of this through-sung piece by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Don Black and Charles Hart (lyrics) was mixed, with “overblown” an adjective frequently applied to Trevor Nunn’s direction.

Here Nunn returns to Aspects after some 20 years, applying the same emotional rigour as he did to the outstanding A Little Night Music. The result of this stripped-down close work is nigh-on miraculous, with both Lloyd Webber’s score (superbly rearranged here for just seven musicians) and the narrative revealing themselves to be lush, romantic, sensuous and wrenching.

The stand-out hit tune, Love Changes Everything, remains hauntingly beautiful, echoing through the show and down the years. The source material is a 1955 novel by Bloomsbury group member David Garnett, recounting three generations’ worth of post-War romantic entanglements after 19-year-old Alex (Michael Arden) falls for older French actress Rose (Katherine Kingsley), before losing her to his Uncle George (Dave Willetts). All three leads are faultless but Arden’s pure voice is a thing of particular joy.

There is a danger, as the scenes tick by and Rose flip-flops between Alex and George for the umpteenth time, that there is only going to be one aspect of love on offer, and an increasingly overwrought one at that.

Gradually, though, the action broadens out with the introduction of George and Rose’s daughter Jenny (Rebecca Brewer) and when it does, I’d recommend you keep a fresh packet of tissues handy.

There will undoubtedly still be cavilling from some quarters, because Aspects forces us to confront elements that are increasingly alien.

For starters we have the through-singing, shaded elegantly here to highlight the big numbers.

Above all, there’s the fact that this musical doesn’t shy from being unashamedly romantic and all but drilling a direct and honest emotional response from us. I spent most of the second half in tears, and I’d go back for more in a heartbeat.

Until September 26.
Information: 020 7907 7060, menierchocolatefactory.com