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It's hard not to pity the Woman in White. The poor, pale lady arrived in London's West End last week hauling a wagonload of expectations. This is, after all, Andrew Lloyd Webber's homecoming. Eighteen years after The Phantom of the Opera, after his American odysseys (Sunset Boulevard and Whistle Down the Wind), his Irish adventure (The Beautiful Game) and his Indian idyll (Bombay Dreams, which he produced), the composer has at last found an English gothic tale with which he might be able to harness the spooky power — not to mention the box-office returns — of Phantom.

Or so his followers hoped. And it's easy to see why Lloyd Webber fans thought The Woman in White would be a return to phantasmagorical form. Wilkie Collins' 1860 novel is a Victorian chiller with a twisted yet strangely hypnotic villain. If that doesn't sound familiar enough, the bad guy is played by Michael Crawford, the original Phantom. So high are hopes for this show that long-runner Les Misérables was evicted from the 1,400-seat Palace Theatre (proprietor: Lloyd Webber) to make way for his new lady. But she's not quite the date fans might have hoped for.

It's not just expectation that weighs on the new show — Crawford appears in a fat suit that renders him unrecognizable. Lloyd Webber insists that he wasn't trying to make Phantom II, but comparisons are inevitable, and unflattering. Phantom was about more than atmospherics: it had a focused narrative drive and a brilliant illusionist production by Hal Prince. Woman, by contrast, is often pallid and dramatically confused.

This is a disappointment not just for Lloyd Webber fans but for theaterland as a whole. These are tricky times for musical theater: the genre seems unable to produce successful new material, and depends too much on yesterday's tunes — shows based on old pop songs (by Abba, Queen, Rod Stewart), old movies (The Producers) and old faithfuls (Mary Poppins). If it turns out that Lloyd Webber — the man who had us singing about cats, trains, even Jesus — is unable to deliver a new hit, then who can? The industry was certainly banking on Woman to be a winner. The production is budgeted at $6.8 million, and you see at once where much of the money went: the sets. Director Trevor Nunn (Cats, Sunset Boulevard) and designer William Dudley (The Breath of Life, The Coast of Utopia) use ultrasophisticated animated projections on three white semicircular screens. They create a cinematic labyrinth, where the screens spin and whirl, with intricate backdrops that cross-cut, dissolve and move with the characters. When a character is required to climb the stairs to the attic, she only has to walk on one spot while the 'house' sweeps down past her — and when she reaches the attic, one screen shows its cluttered interior, while two others depict a vista of roofs and chimneys outside. It's frenetic, it's dizzying, it's the first show ever to give me motion sickness.

Gee-whiz technology has its place in the theater, but here it often distracts from a serious tale of three wronged women. Apart from the titular woman in white, who is justly terrified of dastardly Sir Percival Glyde, there are the plucky Marian and her sister Laura, who are abused by the very same Glyde and his flamboyant Italian accomplice, Count Fosco. Among the country mansions and shadowy villages of Hampshire and Cumberland, the three find their fates terrifyingly entwined.

Where Lloyd Webber scores is with the score. It would have been easy for the composer to fall back on a lush, serve-all orchestral cushion. But to his credit, he tries something sparse, minimalist and deliberately discomfiting. In a scene borrowed from a Charles Dickens story (The Signalman), the Act I curtain rises on a bitingly cold railway cutting, telegraph wires whipping ominously in the wind. It's an unsettling, otherworldly sound, and thereafter the score strains to upset expectations; major keys turn to minor with a shudder, songs end in a subdued moan. The arrangement is at its best for Laura's wedding scene, where a frighteningly pallid girl sings The Holly and the Ivy around one sinister note, and a scream is heard in the church. Genuinely creepy. The plot's big twist (which won't be revealed here) is likewise beautifully carried off, providing the show's one hair-raising thrill.

But between these two are far too few memorable moments. It's just not in Lloyd Webber to deliver low-key satisfactions. Big sweeping melodies are what he does best, and here the strain of his self- imposed leash suffocates the drama. It doesn't help that the lyrics, by David Zippel, from the adaptation of the book by Charlotte Jones, are mostly flat when they should seep with accumulating terror. The script is also far less subtle than the original. Collins' Fosco is a fascinating creation — obese, aging and yet with a mind of such deviousness that Marian is spellbound. "He looks," she writes in her diary, "like a man who could tame anything … the man has attracted me." Onstage, Fosco is reduced to a clownish rogue. "As we Italians say, The plot, she thickens," he giggles.

Nonetheless, Crawford, who followed Phantom by retreating to a Las Vegas showcase, re-stakes his dormant reputation as a brilliant character actor. Even in his fat suit, he has an easy command of the stage, preening and prancing with joy. Extra points for hitting a long high note in his showstopping A Gift for Living Well with a large, live rat crawling around his neck. As Marian, Maria Friedman is appropriately plucky and anguished. The other women are less memorable. As the title character, Angela Christian is saddled with an irritating, hard-to-decipher accent. It's hard to be eerie when you're singing, "I be raaht oopset!" Audience members who feel the same way have at least this consolation: the old Phantom is still playing, at a theater just down the road.

• JAMES INVERNE | London
• Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White fails to meet expectations