I'd never been to one of Ian Marshall Fisher's Lost Musicals series but the idea is excellent: semi-staged, Sunday afternoon performances of neglected shows. And even if Fanny, with music and lyrics by Harold Rome and book by Joshua Logan and SN Behrman, is no masterpiece it takes you back to the pre-blockbuster era when musicals were driven by their story.
Based on Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy, the show suffers from its three-into-one compression. Marius, the cafe owner's son who runs away to sea leaving the pregnant Fanny behind, is reduced to a cipher; and Fanny's marriage to the aged, wealthy Panisse is dramatically o'er hasty. But there is something genuinely moving about Panisse's determination to raise Fanny's child as his own. And the show poses an intriguing question: whether a child belongs to its real or adoptive parent.
Rome, who started out writing leftwing revue and ended up composing Gone with the Wind, also comes up with a decent score. Even if the local-colour numbers suggest a Marseilles seen through the distorting prism of 42nd Street, Rome is good on emotion. Panisse's Never Too Late for Love is a delightful hymn to senescent passion. And Birthday Song is a cleverly wrought second-act fugue showing that ingenuity didn't start with Sondheim.
But what impressed me most was the elegant simplicity of Fisher's production. James Smillie as Marius's father, Cesar, is, rather eccentrically, the only performer to essay a Marseilles accent, but he captures the character's life-loving zest. Liza Pulman lights up the stage as Fanny, whose marriage to Panisse proves that, even if money doesn't buy happiness, it certainly upgrades despair. And Frank Lazarus, in a part improbably played by Robert Morley at Drury Lane in 1956, lends Panisse the right mixture of roguishness and kindly affection. I can't say I'm aching to see this as a full-scale revival, but it reminds one of the lost pleasures of the narrative-musical and whets the appetite for Silk Stockings and Evening Primrose later in the season.
· Until March 27. Box office: 0870 737 7737.
