Personals
Apollo Shaftesbury, London **
It is not Closer. It is not even close. This musical comedy about six New Yorkers looking for love through lonely hearts adverts is slick, sassy, very cute and emotionally bloodless.
Let us not kid ourselves. It is not the score, jaunty though it is, nor the reasonably witty lyrics, nor the appealing young cast who portray the gaggle of lonely, professional, affluent New Yorkers on the lookout for love, that have smoothed the passage of this show into the West End. It is the fact that this is an instantly recognisable piece of juvenilia by the team that went on to create and write the TV hit Friends.
But the kind of ironic, neurotic comedy that works in half-hour slots within the relatively trivial medium of TV quickly seems irritating within the more focused and demanding environment of the theatre, even more so when the revue-style format doesn't allow for real development of plot or character.
Sure, you laugh at Louis, the lonely virgin who has a more meaningful relationship with his 78-lesson teach-yourself-dating tape than with any real woman, and at the Typesetter who advertises for a dwarf for his wife as a joke and finds himself living happily in a small ménage à trois, but you are laughing at the gag, not the character. In the same way you don't really care whether cute but bland Sam gets it together with cute but bland Claire, the girl next door, or whether their fear of failure will paralyse them.
Those with infinite patience for the self-absorbed and self-deprecating Bridget Jones style of ditsy humour will probably enjoy themselves heartily. Otherwise, although this show is too good-natured to really hate, you'd be better off getting yourself a life rather than a ticket.
Until August 26. Box office: 020-7494 5070.
