Those who think the modern musical absurd should take a gander at this historic specimen: the big hit of 1899, lovingly revived in a concert version. Floradora ran for 455 performances in London, 549 in New York and kept coming back; but, while Leslie Stuart's music has much charm and wit, the book by Owen Hall beggars belief.
The action shifts, somewhat uneasily, between a Philippine island and a castle in Wales. The former is the source of the perfume that gives the show its title and of a cat's cradle of amatory relationships. They involve an American millionaire, a native girl, an absconding peer, a society lady and countless others, but they no longer involve us. What is revealing, sociologically, are the assumptions behind the show: that Americans have money but no class, the British have class but no money and that all women born east of Suez have a dimpled, child-like innocence.
Stuart's songs compensate for the asinine libretto. Tell Me Pretty Maiden, originally performed by a double choric sextet, is ingeniously seductive, and, whatever one thinks of its sentiments, A Military Man is a rousing hymn to the sexuality of soldiering. But, in the end, Floradora confirms that a musical is only as good as its book.
Admittedly, the piece - musically directed by Timothy Henty and minimally staged by Nina Brazier - could hardly be better done. Simon Butteriss brings energy to the comic role of a bumptious phrenologist whose financial greed leads him to announce that "science is golden". Abigail Jaye - as the millionaire's daughter ogling the front row in The Fellow Who Might - sparkles, as do Rosemary Ashe as a titled predator and Katie Foster-Barnes as a farm girl. With only two more Sunday stagings to come, the show is certainly a collector's item; but, with its quaint, neo-Gilbertian absurdity, it reminds us how far the musical has come in the past 100 years.
· On January 15 and 22. Box office: 0870 4000 838
