Love Never Dies – and, despite Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical closing abruptly in the West End after only a year, it looks set to be reborn when a film of the Australian production is released in March.

The show, a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, has fared rather better in Australia, where Simon Phillips directed a different staging to that seen in the UK. The production was filmed over three days in September at the Regent Theatre in Melbourne, where it received its Australian premiere. It will be released in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray on 12 March, before going on sale in the US from May.

Theatre critic Michael Coveney, who saw a screening of the film last week, described it as "the best film of a stage musical I've ever seen".

The Australian production, which transferred to Sydney's Capitol Theatre earlier this month, has been delivered by a completely new creative team, and features new set and costume designs by Gabriela Tylesove, in addition to script and score changes made during the London run. Coveney described it as "much tighter, tauter".

Despite collecting a fine crop of star ratings, Love Never Dies ran for just over a year in the West End, having cancelled a number of performances during that period while revisions were put in place. Described at the time as "the most pre-emptively vilified show in history" – a title that has arguably been taken by Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark since – Love Never Dies is widely thought to have never recovered from being rechristened Paint Never Dries by theatre bloggers the West End Whingers.