LONDON — There’s no accounting, it seems, for the unspeakable places a man might be driven by a wayward libido. On my first morning on British soil this month, I opened the newspaper to discover not one but three accounts of eminent entertainment personalities — a soap opera star, a disc jockey, a broadcaster — charged with molesting girls and women. (“Roache assaulted me in ‘Coronation Street’ toilets when I was 14, woman tells court,” one headline read.)  Later that same day, with the sort of mind-scrambling synchronicity I have come to expect of my theatergoing marathons here, I found myself attending not one but two onstage portraits of extremely dangerous erotic activity. In one of them, such carnal pursuits merely led to the collapse of a government. And, oh yes, a suicide in the finale.  In the other show, the consequences included a double-digit body count, a decapitation or two and lots of blood on the walls.  Did I mention these are musicals? Tragic political humiliation and severed body parts: Now that’s something to sing about.  As it happens, the jollier and more willfully comic of these two shows is the one with all the gore. That’s “American Psycho,” at the Almeida Theater in Islington, the Headlong company’s hit adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious 1991 novel about a serial-killing yuppie. Adapted by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Duncan Sheik, this lurid tale of a well-dressed, ax-wielding stockbroker in late-20th-century Manhattan is often a hoot, if not quite the unsettling “musical thriller” it’s been advertised as.  Meanwhile, in the West End, the Aldwych Theater is host to “Stephen Ward,” the latest from Andrew Lloyd Webber, the king of the British poperetta, whose crown has been slipping in recent years. A rather pious, if innuendo-laden, account of back-channel diplomacy (see what I mean?) in Britain in the early 1960s, “Stephen Ward” reanimates the events that led to the government scandal known as the Profumo Affair.  Less solemn in its sensationalism, “American Psycho” seems to have the better odds for a fruitful future. For one thing, it looks back to a period — the 1980s — that theatergoers under 50 may still remember and even romanticize. The majority of heads at the “Stephen Ward” matinee I attended were gray; at “American Psycho,” there was at least one large group of teenagers on a class outing.  But both shows use tabloid material for didactic purposes and, specifically, to condemn the morally vacuous eras they depict. “Stephen Ward” — whose title character is a fashionable London osteopath accused of running a call-girl ring — is presented as a portrait of a martyr to the ruling class’s sexual hypocrisy. This allows Mr. Lloyd Webber and his lyricists, Christopher Hampton and Don Black, to create long ballads (and longer stretches of sung recitative) with a vaguely ’60s beat that keep morphing into the thick trickle of vintage Lloyd Webber syrup.  In “American Psycho,” as was true of Mr. Ellis’s novel and Mary Harron’s 2000 film adaptation, what’s on trial is a soulless landscape of overpaid, designer-clad stockbrokers whose most urgent existential question is how to get a good table at that hot new restaurant. This show has the advantage of being able to recreate the annoyingly catchy electronic beats of middle-of-the-road pop hits of several decades ago.  What’s more, a self-conscious theatergoer can groove to these tunes while laughing at them, since they’re presented satirically. And there’s the added attraction, at least for Londoners, of having the deranged but impeccably attired Patrick Bateman played by Matt Smith, who spent four seasons on television as the star of “Doctor Who.” (His predecessor on that series, David Tennant, is currently portraying Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company, further proof that there’s life after time served as a humanoid alien.)  Death by Huey Lewis and the News (surely a fate no one deserves) figures prominently in “American Psycho,” as it did in the movie version. The musical’s first act ends in Patrick’s apartment, as he takes an ax to a rival (in both business and sartorial perfection), while Mr. Lewis’s “Hip to Be Square” plays on the stereo. The contrast of that song’s peppy blandness and the gruesomeness of Patrick’s notion of playing host came across more chillingly in the film, which starred Christian Bale.  In this version, directed by Rupert Goold with a set by Es Devlin (both hot names these days), the scene feels oddly inert. The combination of Jon Clark’s red-streaked lighting and Mr. Smith’s curdled expression never quite gels into the required shock effect. For a world that has since feasted regularly on prime-time fare like “Dexter” and “The Blacklist,” such limply abstracted bloodletting can feel watery.  That Mr. Ellis’s novel doesn’t read tame 20 years later has much to do with its relentless and disgusted forensic and erotic detail, combined with its unending catalog of brand names. The book is a sustained dry heave. It’s like one long, parched hangover, through which everybody and everything looks so vile that you wouldn’t mind seeing it all violently obliterated.  The musical does its best to recreate this perspective with chalk-drawing projections (video design by Finn Ross) meant to conjure the arrested-development interior of Patrick’s mind. But when you bring Patrick’s high-living, desperately superficial frenemies into the open air of a musical stage, they inevitably turn into quick-sketch cartoons.  The show also makes the mistake of exaggerating Patrick’s nerdy inferiority complex. While Mr. Smith (like Mr. Bale) has a masklike face with killer cheekbones and dead eyes, he doesn’t really feel very scary. O.K., maybe when he’s waiting for a date with a nail gun in his lap.  Where the show soars is in its pastiche production numbers, which wittily evoke 1980s MTV videos. The score by Mr. Sheik (who showed more bona fide passion in his “Spring Awakening”) wallows happily in orgasmic electronic chords and affectless echo-chamber vocals.  As choreographed by Lynne Page (whose dances could use more precision in other numbers), a big boys’ business-card-swapping sequence is both scalpel-cut satire and light as air. So, if more obvious, is the women’s ensemble number that consists almost entirely of the rhymed names of fashion designers.  And an ensemble dance-floor sequence in which Patrick executes the entire corps de ballet while crooning like a member of Spandau Ballet is both funny and genuinely disturbing. If the rest of show could hone itself to this razor’s edge of stylization, “American Psycho” could well become the bloody, good entertainment it aspires to be.  I hold out no similar hopes for “Stephen Ward,” directed by Richard Eyre and starring Alexander Hanson as the titular party boy who died for the sins of the Conservative Party. In this rendering, Ward and his circle — including the immortal sex kittens Christine Keeler (Charlotte Spencer) and Mandy Rice-Davies (Charlotte Blackledge, the show’s liveliest presence) — come across as good-natured creatures who just want to have fun.  It’s those mean, self-serving bigwigs (cabinet ministers, officers of the law, aristocrats) who are the villains (warranting ominous organ chords). They make poor Stephen the scapegoat when it comes to light that Christine was having affairs with both the secretary of state for war, John Profumo (Daniel Flynn), and a Soviet envoy (Ian Conningham). Though a fair amount of skin is (decorously) exposed in the show, the characters still seem less like flesh-and-blood swingers than ciphers in a morality play.  The vulpine Mr. Hanson sings in that ominously whispery voice we have come to associate with Lloyd Webber heroes in love or in pain, and his lyrics include a lot of unfortunate lines about flying too close to the sun and standing too close to the fire.  Still, I’ll always have a soft spot for a show that features an orgy of undressed, middle-aged Tory types, with whips and bondage masks, singing (in a variation on Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s oft-quoted catchphrase), “You’ve never had it so good, you’ve never had it so often.”  A version of this article appears in print on January 21, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Carnal Carnivals of Song and Dance. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
Two dark new London musicals, “Stephen Ward,” about the early-1960s Profumo scandal, and “American Psycho,” show men and their libidos behaving badly.