"He hits hard, and below the belt if need be. But at least he hits." That was the opinion of one US critic about the work of Clifford Odets, the socialist New Yorker whose plays of social protest were popular in the 1930s. It is more than you can really say about this pleasantly innocuous musical version of his 1937 play, Golden Boy, about a young boxer trying to hit the big time. With Sammy Davis Jr in the lead, it ran for over 500 performances on Broadway in 1964-65. Now, it is more interesting for its reflection of an era than for Charles Strouse's smoky but not spectacularly memorable score, or Lee Adams's cliched lyrics.
Odets transposed his own story from an Italian-American community to Harlem. One of the best things about the evening, besides the tremendous array of terrific black talent on stage, is the way it shows ordinary black people struggling in a white man's world. Not that you should imagine for a moment that this is a radical evening in any sense. It is enveloped in the feelgood, romantic conventions of the postwar American musical, and spends more time on the relationship of Joe with his manager's doxy, the self-destructive Lorna, than on civil rights. The final anthem, No More, is more a mild stamping of black feet than any Malcolm X battle cry.
But then, the average musical of the period, or indeed straight play, barely registered that black people existed. And if the narrative holds no surprises, it does at least grip as Joe fights his way out of Harlem but discovers that success doesn't taste as sweet as he had thought it would. The final bout in the boxing ring is genuinely exciting, although the evening seems to tail off, lacking a real ending.
Rick Jacobs's production could clearly do with more money and sometimes more energy, particularly in the choreography department. But he makes a pretty good fist of it, and the major performances are a knockout - particularly from Jason Pennycooke as the wiry and rather winsome Joe, Sally Ann Triplett as the corrosive vamp Lorna and Alana Maria as Joe's straight-talking sister, Anna, who refuses to buy the dream.
· Until July 12. Box office: 020-8858 7755.
