We are always told that Oklahoma! changed the American musical. In fact, Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey (1940) is a far more pioneering work. It was the first American musical to boast an anti-hero and the first realistically to depict nightclub sleaze. And, even if Love day Ingram's revival doesn't have the shabby tackiness of the 1980 Half Moon production, it is still superbly staged and highly sexed.
The Minerva studio itself is here given a thrusting, peninsular stage that makes an ideal setting for John O'Hara's story of a phallocentric drifter, Joey Evans. Having landed a job in a grungy Chicago club, he is picked up by rich-bitch Mrs Vera Simpson, toy-boyishly indulged and given the boot when the blackmailers move in. It is, in short, a musical about real, ambivalent people: Joey is a likable louse, while the 40ish Mrs Simpson has both the sexual voracity of the neglected wife and a cool mercilessness when her public reputation is endangered.
The intimate setting also allows you to savour Lorenz Hart's lyrics, which have rhymes that snap and bite like an alligator's jaws. Zip, the most famous number, satirising a stripper's intellectual pretensions, is actually an irrelevance. Clare Burt here sings it well but is never heard from again. Far better is Hart's ability to write lyrics that uniquely combine passion and wit. In Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, Vera cries: "I'll sing to him/Each spring to him/And worship the trousers that cling to him", reminding you that her real interests lie below the belt. Hart's night-owl sophistication offsets Rodgers' melodic romanticism in a way that Hammerstein's plangent folksiness rarely did.
But much of the charm of Ingram's production comes from the choreography of Craig Revel Horwood, which is witty, character-driven and the cloak for some wonderful scenic transitions. The nightclub routines themselves have a parodic, rump-brandishing sexi ness. Even more erotic is a duo for Vera and Joey - Den of Iniquity - in which she straddles him before they curl up together in an angora rug.
Susannah Fellows's Vera has just the right mix of social poise and sexual hunger, and Martin Crewes - unlike Sinatra in the movie version - is a youthful opportunist rather than an ageing roué. There is also priceless support from Michelle Hodgson, who plays a bored showgirl with leggy lassitude, and from Wayne Cater, who shines especially as a fairy-footed choreographer in a saucy beret. It all adds up to an evening of untrammelled delight.
Until September 2. Box office: 01243 781312 .
