Mae West said that she made herself platinum, but she was born dirty blonde. Claudia Shear, author and star of this tribute to America's original blonde icon, is neither platinum nor dirty - she's downright filthy and not afraid to show it.
In her explosive British debut, Shear makes Sarah Jessica Parker look like a shrinking violet. She is an electrifying figure, all mouth and eros, and magnificent pneumatic proof that you needn't be a stick insect to be as sexy as hell. This piece of Shear brilliance won a Tony award in New York for best play. If the show were no more than a theatrical homage to Mae West it would be fine, but Dirty Blonde is far more than that. Shear has used the myth of Mae to create a poignant, fully realised drama about people who clothe their loneliness in fantasy.
The problem for Mae West was that she grew up trapped inside Mae West's body. Her dogged compulsion to cling on to her reputation led to the humiliating spectacle of the partially deaf, 85-year-old actress stumbling through her final, tawdry films, hiring squadrons of lithe young body builders to fall at her feet.
But if it was hard for Mae West being Mae West, it is even harder for Charlie, a shy, overweight male film archivist, to be her too. Charlie suspects that his impulsive need to dress up as the blonde siren may preclude a proper adult relationship. But that is before he meets Jo, a fellow devotee, who has plenty of unresolved emotional issues of her own.
Shear slips comfortably between the roles of Mae and Jo, but you simply will not see a finer, funnier performance than Kevin Chamberlain's as the hapless hulk of self-loathing that she falls for. James Lapine directs a simple staging with imaginative flair, while Douglas Stein's set has the clean lines and ruched satin of a vaudevillian Prada store.
Bob Stillman completes the cast, playing multiple roles and a mean piano to boot. These are performances worth crossing the Atlantic for, never mind a trip to Leeds. You really should come up and see it sometime.
· Until August 3. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
