You can hardly have anything but a good time at Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because Adrian Noble's production is so determined that you will. There is nothing like old-fashioned excess to make an audience feel it is getting its £42.50's worth.
Chitty has more sets than even the biggest, brashest 1980s musical, more changes of clothes than Victoria Beckham, so many cast members that the stage sometimes resembles Oxford Circus tube station at rush hour, as well as oodles of cute kids, winsome dogs, Heath Robinson-style machinery, silver and gold confetti falling on the audience and sufficient fairy lights to worry the national grid. It is as if Noble has made a theatrical effects shopping list and then just thought, hell, I've got the budget so we'll have the lot.
The result is like a glorious, gaudy and very vulgar pantomime. And that's before we even get to the car that flies - actually rather more lumbering and less impressive than it is cracked up to be. In the circumstances, and in the face of so much spectacle, the performances might seem pretty incidental, but the new cast are actually rather scrumptious.
Gary Wilmot is an infinitely more attractive, far less self-obsessed Caractacus Potts than Michael Ball. Russ Abbot brings real flair and a lesson in comic timing to Grandpa Potts. Caroline Sheen's Truly is just the right side of bumptious. And, as the Child Catcher, Wayne Sleep cleverly negotiates that fine line between the absolutely terrifying and the downright ridiculous. These are performers who are never going to be out-acted by the scenery.
The production and design do so much of the work for the audience that you could argue it leaves little to the imagination. The second half is over-extended by Baron Bomburst and his wife, who you wish would both buzz off to Brazil a little quicker, and the entire show is very definitely designed for the theatrically sweet-toothed. But with such Rolls-Royce production values, this old banger can't help but spread a little West End happiness.
· Booking until February. Box office: 0870 890 1108.
