The Belgrade in Coventry has long been overdue to put on a revival, and former Dundee Rep artistic director Hamish Glen, who did such admirable work in Scotland, would seem like the chap to do it. But he slips up with this Kander and Ebb musical, set in a rundown roller-skating rink. A tale of mother-daughter rivalry, misunderstandings and angst, it has a book by the US king of tear-jerker theatre, Terrence McNally, that belongs on the therapist's couch, not in the theatre.
If Glen's production sounded anything like as good as it looks in a vaguely art deco-style design by Patrick Connellan, it might just make a case for this 1984 musical, which is set in the early 1970s but slips back in time to the 1950s. However, the over-amplified sound means that Diane Langton's unmaternal Anna and Lucy Williamson's hippy-dippy daughter Angel are reduced to screeching at each other.
Mind you, there is plenty to screech about: Angel returns home unexpectedly after a seven-year absence to find that her mother has sold the rink and it is about to be razed to the ground. But you can't bulldoze memories so easily, and soon mother and daughter are locked in a cycle of anger and recrimination that leads them back to Angel's childhood and the disappearance of her father. To be fair, Glen handles this concept rather well at times, and the opening images of Angel's younger self skating alone in the rink are as haunting as any you will see in the theatre.
On the whole, though, the flashbacks are clumsily integrated into the main action, and can't be salvaged by the staging. The show lumbers to its predictable conclusion, with occasional detours up blind alleys. It seems more like a musical written in the 1950s than one merely set in the period.
It doesn't help that Anna and Angel are quite possibly two of the least sympathetic women ever to grace the musical stage, or that Langton or Williamson do very little to give them more appeal. When mother and daughter end up falling into each other's arms, the only satisfaction is the thought that here are two people who completely deserve each other.
· Until October 4. Box office: 024-7655 3055.
