The Royal Albert Hall has regularly played host to opera, but this is the first time it has presented a fully staged musical. Show Boat should be a good choice. It's a big show with big themes that requires big thinking, and Jerome Kern's score has a strong claim to being one of the greatest pieces of musical theatre ever written.
But Francesca Zambello's in-the-round staging of the story of the life and loves of a group of travelling actors on a Mississippi boat at the end of the 19th century is not so much Show Boat as a very slow boat. I'm astonished that opera works in this space, because a musical doesn't stand a chance. Zambello makes the mistake of simply trying to fill up the space: there are 70 in the cast and some big unwieldy bits of scenery. This Mississippi is actually wet. But the more she piles on the spectacle the more sketchy the production becomes, and I found myself uncharacteristically longing for a traditional proscenium arch. At least in a prosc-arch theatre you can see who is actually singing or talking and know where the sound is coming from. Here the focus - and the amplification - is all over the place, creating an experience that is oddly diffuse. Like water, the show slips through your fingers.
But even a less than adequate production can't hide the sheer brilliance of Kern's score which includes the total joy of numbers such as Why Do I Love You? or the magnificence of the anthem Ol' Man River, a song you don't so much hear as feel in your guts. The weaknesses of the production continue into the casting, but Angela Renee Simpson as Queenie, Mark Coles as Joe and Rebecca Thornhill as Julie, the young mulatto woman destroyed by racism, act as if they're in far classier company.
· Until June 25. Box office: 020-7838 3100.
