The funny musical is back: witness the current Broadway success of Spamalot, The Producers and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. And Chichester has had the wit to revive this adroitly satirical 1961 show from the Guys and Dolls team of Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows. Even the choice of Election Night to launch a season devoted to "Con Art" implies an impish mischief on the part of the artistic directorate.
What makes the show rare among American musicals is that its hero, J Pierrepont Finch, is an insidious little creep. Using Shepherd Mead's eponymous 1952 handbook as his guide, he starts out as window-washer to a big corporation and ends up chairman of the board. But the libretto suggests that Finch's only talents are ingratiation and good timing: he schmoozes everyone in sight and, even when he promotes a disastrous treasure hunt, stoops to conquer. And much of the success of Martin Duncan's production lies in Joe McFadden's mix of guile and charm as the fast-rising Finch.
The same qualities also permeate Loesser's music and lyrics. The delicious A Secretary Is Not A Toy warns us that "her pad is to write in and not spend the night in". But the highlight is I Believe In You, set in the executive washroom, in which the hero addresses a rapt hymn of adoration to his own reflection: a narcissistic love song that Sondheim uncannily echoed in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum. With a bevy of execs wheeling round their own skeletal washstands, the number is a visual triumph.
James Bolam amusingly invests the boss with nervous insecurity rather than bloated bombast. Annette McLaughlin memorably suggests his mistress has a hidden canniness, while Fiona Dunn, as Finch's girlfriend, could imbue her devotion with more irony. But this is to quibble at a wonderfully buoyant production that manages to satirise the corporate ethos with ensemble verve.
· In rep until September 10. Box office: 01243 781312.
