LONDON — To think that all this time that poor old half-faced composer hasn’t been dead at all, just stewing in his lust for greater glory. Being the title character of “The Phantom of the Opera,” the most successful musical of all time, wasn’t enough for him. Oh, no. Like so many aging stars, he was determined to return — with different material and a rejuvenated body — to the scene of his first triumph. So now he’s back in the West End with a big, gaudy new show. And he might as well have a “kick me” sign pasted to his backside.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for the Phantom, who has been uncomfortably reincarnated in “Love Never Dies,” which opened Tuesday night at the Adelphi Theater here. Surely no stage show has ever been as widely and severely prejudged as this belated sequel from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

You see, Mr. Lloyd Webber’s original “Phantom of the Opera,” based on the oft-filmed 1911 novel by Gaston Leroux, has developed a stark raving fan base since it opened (and never closed) in London and on Broadway in the late 1980s. When the news got out that there was to be another show about the Phantom — to be set in early-20th-century Coney Island, no less, instead of gaslight Paris — a few of those fans took to their cybersoapboxes to cry sacrilege.

Soon theater writers (including me) were receiving e-mail messages from “Phantom”-ites lamenting the show’s rank inappropriateness. And they hadn’t even seen the darn thing. Once the musical went into previews, many were reporting in chat rooms and blogs that their darkest fears had been confirmed.

Of course, bad advance word on the Internet has sometimes proved false. (Ever hear of “Avatar”?) And I would be delighted to tell you that’s what happened here, especially since “Love Never Dies” is scheduled for Broadway this fall. But how can I, when at every opportunity Mr. Lloyd Webber’s latest sets itself up to be knocked down? Directed by the protean Jack O’Brien (“Hairspray,” the New York production of “The Coast of Utopia”), choreographed by a seriously underused Jerry Mitchell and designed by Bob Crowley (“Mary Poppins,” “The History Boys”), this poor sap of a show feels as eager to be walloped as a clown in a carnival dunking booth.

For starters, the title, with its promise of immortality, was just asking for trouble. And its breathless solemnity pervades the show’s every aspect. This production keeps such a straight face, it’s as if the slightest smile might crack it. It never acknowledges that in a musical in which no one could exactly be described as animated, it might be a mistake to introduce your leading lady in the form of an automaton in her image. Or that it’s probably not a good idea to have your hero, in his first solo, sing “the moments creep, but I can’t bear to sleep” to a melody that moves like a sloth in quicksand.

That fellow for whom time creeps is the Phantom (Ramin Karimloo), now going by the name of Mr. Y. (Is that because Y is the, uh, sequel to X?) A decade after he terrorized the Paris Opera with falling chandeliers and his deadly Punjab lasso trick, Mr. Y has set up his own little sinister sideshow, called Phantasma (no comment), in Coney Island. Though Phantasma bids fair to be the season’s must-see cultural destination, the Phantom deplores “10 years of wasting my time in smoke and noise.” (No comment.)

Under his assumed name, the Phantom engages Christine Daaé (Sierra Boggess), the famous French soprano whom he once stalked and hypnotized, to appear in his show. Wearing the latest in French fashion (and a cunning little head mike), she arrives with her vicomte husband, Raoul (Joseph Millson), and her 10-year-old son, Gustave (played by a rotating cast of child actors). The advent of the glamorous Christine antagonizes the Phantom’s envious aides-de-camp, Madame Giry (Liz Robertson, doing a Frenchified Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers in “Rebecca”) and her daughter, Meg (Summer Strallen), hitherto the singing star of Phantasma.

Friends of “Phantom” will recognize these characters, as they are all (except Gustave) recycled — and in some cases, changed beyond recognition — from the earlier show. The book is credited to four writers: Mr. Lloyd Webber, the comedian Ben Elton, the novelist Frederick Forsyth and the show’s lyricist, Glenn Slater. And its plot is so elaborate and implausible it makes the libretto of “Il Trovatore” read like a first-grade primer. If you don’t know the first “Phantom,” you will be very confused; if you do know the first “Phantom,” you will also be very confused.

Granted, using Coney Island as the setting makes a certain sense. “The Phantom of the Opera” was one of the first (and best) versions of that grandiose showbiz genre, the musical as amusement park ride. (The last time I saw it, 10 years ago, it was sort of like visiting Coney Island’s venerable Cyclone roller coaster, rickety but sturdy.) So why not put on a show set in a real amusement park?

Yet the wheels that keep this particular park in motion grind torturously. There’s no equivalent to the stage-crossing gondola of “Phantom” (unless you count the mechanical glass horse that briefly appears in Act I). The thrill rides, like much of the scenery here, are digital projections (often rather pretty) on scrims. Most of the three-dimensional scenery is made up of vast Art Noveau gates and sculptures, huge creations that match Mr. Lloyd Webber’s melodies in form and weight.

While lushly orchestrated (by David Cullen with Mr. Lloyd Webber), the score is, for the most part, so slow that you have time to anticipate Mr. Slater’s next leaden rhyme. Each of the songs — which range from bathing-beauty frolics to power-chord operetta ballads — spins a single tune until it loses its tread.

Since the lead singers are required to haunt demanding, throat-taxing upper registers, it is perhaps too much to expect them to act as well. As the Phantom, Mr. Karimloo sings with all the force that artificial amplification allows. Vocally, the pretty Ms. Boggess (who starred in “The Little Mermaid” on Broadway) combines the more mechanical qualities of Jeanette MacDonald and Julie Andrews. Mr. Millson glares handsomely. And Ms. Strallen, as the unappreciated Meg, has a spark of something like personality.

If this show could speed up and loosen up it might be (marginally) more amusing. As it is, only a couple of sequences are campy enough to elicit “whoa, nelly” smiles. Well, one, anyway: an electric-rock number in which the Phantom, accompanied by an automaton skeleton organist, communes with little Gustave, who takes off his jacket and swings it in the air, like a miniature Van Halen member.

That’s the concluding number of the first act, and it actually has some energy. But true to self-sabotaging form, this musical follows that song with the bizarrely unexciting postscript of Mrs. Danvers, I mean Mme. Giry, tossing the kid’s jacket down a stairwell. This is matched, in the second act climax, by what feels like the longest death scene of all time. Relax, I’m not going to tell you who dies (while gasping out a reprise of the title song). Why bother, when from beginning to end, “Love Never Dies” is its very own spoiler.

In “Neighbors,” a simultaneously overheated and undercooked new play that’s part of the Public Theater’s Lab program, the young playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins tries to trace in bold strokes how the poisons spread by disgraced racial stereotypes continue to contaminate American culture and the American family.

And couldn’t he have left Sister Sledge, Nina Simone and Diana Ross out of it? In the first act the Crow family performs “We Are Family.” During a minstrel parody of “Gone With the Wind” a Simone recording is played. Later Topsy reels through a karaoke number to excerpts from Ms. Ross, Donna Summer and Beyoncé. The overblown implication is that all these performers are somehow contemporary variations on minstrelsy.

But sorting out Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s intentions is probably a fruitless exercise. The play’s undisciplined writing undermines its pretensions to cultural satire, to say nothing of its pretensions to sociological tragedy. (Euripides’ “Iphigenia at Aulis” is lengthily evoked in a monologue from one of Richard’s lectures.) “Neighbors” — or “N(e)ig(h)g(bo)ers” — is a lot more punishing than it is provocative.

NEIGHBORS

By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; directed by Niegel Smith; sets by Mimi Lien; costumes by Gabriel Berry; lighting by Peter West; sound by Ryan Rumery and Christian Frederickson; musical staging by Maija Garcia; production stage manager, Emily Park Smith; general manager, Andrea Nellis; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Jenny Gersten; director of production, Ruth E. Sternberg. A Public/LAB production, presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Andrew D. Hamingson, executive director. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555. Through March 14. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.

WITH: Jocelyn Bioh (Topsy), Danielle Davenport (Melody), Brandon Gill (Jim), Birgit Huppuch (Jean), Chris McKinney (Richard), Okieriete Onaodowan (Sambo), Tonye Patano (Mammy) and Eric Jordan Young (Zip Coon).

A momentous passage in American journalism strides stiffly across the stage of New York Theater Workshop in “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers,” a fact-packed drama by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons, journalists with distinguished careers that have extended into academia and other realms.

Actually, striding is overstating it. Mostly this dramatization of the 1971 showdown between the government and the press stands stock still, for obvious reasons. “Top Secret” was written for and first produced (in 1991) by L.A. Theater Works, a long-running radio-play series. Not much has been done by the director, John Rubinstein, or Mr. Cowan to rethink it for the stage. (Mr. Aarons died in 2004.)

The actors perform with scripts in hand, reading into microphones whose presence is puzzling in a theater of this size — except that they keep the actors tethered in place, relieving the creators of the burden of reconceiving the text as a drama in three dimensions. Accordingly, while “Top Secret” offers a cogent, informative peek into a historic chapter in 20th-century journalism, as an evening of theater it is static and a little ponderous.

I use the word “chapter” pointedly. “Top Secret” really should insert a qualifying phrase in its subtitle indicating that the play deals exclusively with the battle fought by The Washington Post to publish the Pentagon Papers, the multivolume history of the American involvement in Vietnam, originally commissioned by the defense secretary at the time, Robert S. McNamara, but not completed until after he left office in 1968. (Mr. Aarons worked as a reporter and editor for The Post.)

Not to get all partisan or anything, but the full story of the unprecedented attempt by the federal government to muzzle the nation’s press with a prior-restraint order began before the events depicted here. The Pentagon Papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a disillusioned former government consultant, to Neil Sheehan, a reporter for The New York Times. (Mr. Ellsberg was the subject of a documentary nominated for an Oscar this year.) After spending three months verifying the authenticity of the documents, organizing the voluminous material and preparing stories to place the papers in context, The Times began publishing the series on June 13, 1971.

Two days later, after two more installments, a judge granted the government’s request for a restraining order barring The Times from continuing to print the series. Thus began a raft of legal skirmishes that quickly made its way to the Supreme Court. The court’s ruling granting both newspapers the right to publish continues to resonate today, as the desire of the government to keep its secrets and the responsibility of the press to monitor its workings come into frequent conflict.

“Top Secret” picks up the story on June 17. The narrator, the esteemed publisher of The Post, Katharine Graham (a poised Kathryn Meisle), then relatively new to the job, sets the stage: “When the court stopped The Times from printing the next installment, Ben Bradlee was determined to track down a copy of the papers and seize the story for The Post.” (Graham’s son, Stephen Graham, founded New York Theater Workshop.)

A famously hard-driving editor, Bradlee (Peter Strauss) sees the story as a chance for The Post to assert itself as a national paper of significance. Fuming at being scooped on a story in his own backyard and seeing the restraining order against The Times as a golden chance, he pushes for the paper to publish its own installment of the documents the day after acquiring them — a daunting and potentially dangerous proposition.

The first act toggles between scenes depicting The Post’s reporters and editors in a room of Bradlee’s house, desperately trying to sort through the material to find and shape a new angle, and Bradlee and others debating with Brian Kelly (Jack Gilpin), a lawyer for The Post who expresses sensible caution, given that no one knew how The Times case would play out. While heavy on exposition, these scenes effectively clarify the issues of journalistic ethics and moral responsibility at stake.

“You rush into print with something that on the face of it looks innocent,” Kelly argues, “but what if, as a result, some agent or cooperative in Vietnam gets executed?”

“My soapbox may be showing,” replies Ben Bagdikian (John Getz), an assistant managing editor. “But I’m convinced that by printing the Pentagon Papers, The Post will save lives, not cost lives.”

Ultimately the decision must be made by Graham herself, who is called to the phone from a going-away party for a longtime employee to hear all sides of the argument.

“This is not about national security,” Bradlee fulminates, “and it’s not about espionage. It’s about politics. It’s about control, about embarrassment. They don’t want us to expose their cover-ups and their lies.”

Evidence supporting these rousing sentiments is presented in scenes drawn from the tapes President Richard M. Nixon made, released years later, that find the foul-mouthed leader (Larry Pine) bitterly ranting about the perfidy of journalists or complaining that the weather in Hanoi is bad for bombing.

Mr. Pine is delectably smarmy as Nixon, making a colorful foil for Mr. Strauss’s noble terrier Bradlee. Most of the actors play more than one role. Larry Bryggman is both a veteran reporter, Chal Roberts, and Attorney General John Mitchell. Peter Van Norden plays The Post’s thoughtful chairman, Fritz Beebe, and an amusingly exasperated Henry Kissinger. All do their best to inject some volume into the rather flat staging (the microphones are lined up at the front of the stage), but most of the roles don’t give them much texture to work with.

Of little help are the sound effects provided by a couple of actors from a table at the back of the stage. Paper-shuffling, door-slamming and ice-clinking don’t really go a long way toward supplying palpable atmosphere at the theater.

The second act of “Top Secret” moves to the courtroom, after The Post has been hit with its own government lawsuit to stop publication. Here Mr. Cowan and Mr. Aarons have condensed testimony from both the New York and the Washington legal proceedings. But while the suspense over the question of whether to publish gives a sense of urgency to the first act, these scenes bog down in repetition, as the government’s claims that the Pentagon Papers contain information that would compromise national security are methodically taken apart.

There is revelatory detail here, too, but making history (or legal proceedings) thrum with life at the theater is not an easy task. It is harder still when you forsake any attempt to add vitality through staging. “Top Secret” is intelligent and informative, but for those without a pronounced interest in the subject matter, it will feel less like a work of theater than a lecture with audiovisual aids.

TOP SECRET

The Battle for the Pentagon Papers

Text by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons; directed by John Rubinstein; sets and lighting by David Lander; costumes by Holly Poe Durbin; sound by Lindsay Jones; production stage manager, Jennifer Grutza. Presented by New York Theater Workshop, James C. Nicola, artistic director; William Russo, managing director; L.A. Theater Works, Susan Loewenberg, producing director; and Affinity Collaborative Theater, John Dias, Sheila Schwartz and Diane Morrison, founding members. At New York Theater Workshop, 79 East Fourth Street, East Village; (212) 279-4200; nytw.org. Through March 28. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

WITH: Diane Adair (Meg Greenfield), Larry Bryggman (John Mitchell/Chal Roberts/Lamont Vanderhall), John Getz (Ben Bagdikian/Robert Mardian), Jack Gilpin (Brian Kelly/H. R. Haldeman), James Gleason (Murrey Marder/Judge Martin Peel), Matt McGrath (George Wilson/Eugene Patterson), Kathryn Meisle (Katharine Graham), Larry Pine (Richard Nixon/Dennis Doolin), Russell Soder (Soldier/Darryl Cox/Bailiff/Ron Ziegler), Peter Strauss (Ben Bradlee) and Peter Van Norden (Fritz Beebe/Henry Kissinger).