It's all a matter of horses for courses. Doubtless in its original incarnations at the Jermyn Street Theatre and the Mill at Sonning, this tribute to Jessie Matthews had a fragrant charm. Plonked down in the West End for a couple of weeks, however, it looks like a piece of anorexic nostalgia.
Richard Stirling has not overtaxed his imagination creating the book. He starts with the mature Jessie picking up her OBE ("Old But Energetic") at Buck House in 1970. While she waits for her insignia, she looks back over a life that took her from Berwick Street market to stardom in 1920s musicals and movies. But, although Stirling charts her unfortunate showbiz marriages, he never makes clear why the bottom fell out of her career after she collapsed on Broadway in 1941. Only by reading the programme do you discover it was because of her mental fragility and the fact that her soubrette-style sex appeal was no longer fashionable.
The book, however, is largely an excuse for getting the songs on, and here the show has more success. Anne Rogers, the best Eliza I ever saw in My Fair Lady, incarnates the mature Jessie with twinkling graciousness, and even does high kicks in a gold-sequinned body-suit. As the younger Jessie, Jo Gibb may not quite fit the vivid description of her as "that rogue in porcelain" but she's pretty good none the less. She lends Coward's Parisian Pierrot the right wan sadness and turns the title song into a decorous strip, throwing her cares over her shoulder and her outer garments into the stalls.
Gavin Lee also endows Jessie's one-time husband, Sonnie Hale, with a calculating suaveness, and Stewart Nicholls directs and choreographs unfussily. What troubles me, however, is the way London theatre is turning into a giant nostalgia-fest celebrating everything from Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to Queen and Rod Stewart. I love the songs of the Jessie Matthews era, but the arrival of this slender tribute confirms the West End's status as a showbiz Madame Tussauds.
· Until November 8. Box office: 020-7369 1736.
