The music industry never sleeps, and Death Note: The Musical Stage Show Review is proof. Whether it is a new single, a soundtrack, or a concert announcement, this update has fans pressing play on repeat.

The Story So Far

Death Note: The Musical, now playing at London's Barbican Centre until 12 September, is very good fun, and that's both its main virtue and its biggest failing. It's thoroughly entertaining, full of the zingy energy you expect in a stage musical, and it's packed with tricks and ideas. What's missing is the source material's coldness, any deep immersion into Death Note's amoral hubris.

There's also no effort to update the narrative to the present day, where thousands of furious keyboard warriors wish they could kill each other with words. Then again, perhaps Death Note doesn't need updating. At heart, its diabolical high concept isn't about thousands of people.

Yes, you, the one reading that Shonen Jump manga. What if you were given the magic power to kill anyone you wanted? As the show opens, Tokyo schoolboy Light Yagami, played with loud and wholehearted vigor by Xander Pang, is railing against the uselessness of the law in fighting crime.

His classroom argument with his teacher morphs into the first track (“Where Is The Justice?”), as the other students gyrate in their seats to the music. Soon Light acquires the supernatural Death Note that lets him kill with abandon, just by writing people's names on its pages. At first, he slaughters monstrous criminals.

Soon, he's murdering anyone who opposes his crusade. By the end of the musical's first half, his victims literally dance to his tune, as he kills them en masse, over and again. This is a narrative of mortals and immortals.

Unlike Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, there's no question the gods are real. In Death Note, they're death gods, the Shinigami, and we first see them walking on a tilted square metal frame that's suspended over the stage. One of them complains how boring immortality is.

He's Ryuk (Telly Leung), a gleeful scene-stealer in snazzy black. Once he descends to Earth and pairs up with Light, he's filled with merry joie de vivre – his well-known love of apples is milked for all it's worth. For the musical's first half, it's mostly the Light and Ryuk show, as their relationship is the only one given room to register.

Light's arch-enemy, the great detective L, can't hope to make the same impact. He's mostly shown as an isolated madman in a Matrix world of green computer type. Watari, who was the fatherly Alfred to L's Batman in the original, is deleted entirely, while L's relationship with Light's cop dad Soichiro (Paolo Montalban) never gets past antagonism.

The dishevelled staring youth needles Soichiro with his suspicions that Light is the killer they're vainly hunting. L still gets high points – one track synchronises him with a set of dancing doubles like a 1980s music video. I'd also forgotten his hilarious explanation for why he sits hunched like a human owl.

But he's no match for his killer foes. Instead (minor spoiler), the musical gives its second half its own identity by highlighting two more characters. These are the pop leading name Misa (Stephanie Zaharis), who'…

As the story continues to develop, TeraMovies will keep you updated with every new detail. Until then, this remains one of the most closely watched entertainment stories of the week — and the conversation is only getting started.