"Whenever a friend succeeds," said Gore Vidal, "a little something in me dies." Let's hope US standup David Cross doesn't share the sentiment - because, at the opening night of his London show, David Cross and Friends, those friends were altogether funnier than he was.
Cross is the main draw here: he's the Grammy-nominated comic and star of TV hit Arrested Development. But the evening is best thought of as a cream-of-New York cabaret, uniting some of the city's smartest acts - Todd Barry, Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman - to form an entertaining primer on current American comedy.
Cross comperes the show, and so we get only brief bursts of his material. Which, if the opening routine is anything to go by ("I recently bought a dog. And I made some hilarious observations ..."), may be just as well. Cross has a reputation as a firebrand political comic, but tonight we get shapeless and lacklustre routines about pissing elephants and whether there is gravity in heaven.
The evening perks up with the lugubrious Barry, recalling a woman who turned him off sex by too spiritedly approving his choice of condom brand. And with special guest Jimmy Carr, whose hot-off-the-clipboard material includes a characteristically lethal quip about a lucrative new game he's invented called Twin Towers Jenga.
If Schaal and Mirman sometimes threaten to turn the evening from standup gig into YouTube demo, their multimedia sets both showcase pleasingly skewed comic perspectives. Laconic, absurdist Mirman relates how he once trumped a rightwing blowhard ranting about "hardcore child pornography" by demanding to know what other types of child pornography were available.
Baby-voiced Schaal twists goofy girlishness into dark fantasy, as with the pet caterpillar driven to suicidal rage by the endless wait to pupate. But like Schaal's caterpillar, this evening of whimsical American standup is cute, but it is not yet flying.
· From Monday until June 30. Box office: 0871 220 0260.
