This amiable pub theatre always kicks off the new year with something showbizzy, and here it offers 35 choice pearls from the Jerome Kern songbook, seamlessly strung together by Dick Vosburgh and neatly polished by director David Kernan. The result is two hours of shamelessly nostalgic pleasure.
"The keynote of Kern's music is hard-won simplicity," said Stephen Sondheim. But Kern also had a rare gift for adjusting to different lyricists. With Oscar Hammerstein the dominant tone was one of lambent romanticism. PG Wodehouse and Dorothy Fields released Kern's impish gaiety. And with Irene Franklin, Kern wrote a joyous little number, My Husband's First Wife, which is the evening's surprise hit - a devastatingly waspish account of a departed saint of whom we learn "she sang as she brought up the coal every morn", delivered by Angela Richards with just the right adenoidal asperity.
By focusing on Kern's Hollywood years, the show inevitably downplays his early Anglophilia and impact on the Broadway musical with Show Boat, though we are reminded that the first of the musical's three movie versions was almost sunk by casting a Germanic tenor as Gaylord Ravenal. But the main purpose is to get on as many songs as possible, and to hear once again A Fine Romance or The Way You Look Tonight is to be reminded of an era when musicals were a source of escapist pleasure rather than industrial enterprises.
Like Kern's music, the show has a deceptive simplicity. It boasts two musicians and four performers, including Sheri Copeland, Glyn Kerslake and Jamie Golding, all of whom get their moment in the sun alongside the matchless Richards. The show won't change your life. It is simply dedicated, like Arnold Bennett's Denry Machin, to the great cause of cheering us all up.
· Until February 20. Box office: 020-7226 1916.
