The casting of TV presenter and tabloid favourite Denise Van Outen in Chicago is more interesting than it appears. To the show's producers, the calculation must have been simple: people will pay to see the Big Breakfast's brassy ex-hostess, especially if she wears a leotard and fishnets. It is a happy coincidence that her participation sheds new light on Kander and Ebb's musical.
Chicago 's tale of a floozy whose murderous career leads to showbiz celebrity was intended as a broad satire. But Van Outen's West End appearance, hot on the stilettos of Kelly Brook, Dannii Minogue and Jerry Hall, brings the show's argument, that we value notoriety over merit, troublingly close to home.
So is the starlet aware of how Chicago resonates with her own career? "You're a phoney celebrity, kid," says her character's lawyer Billy Flynn, "and in a coupla weeks, no one will know who you are." Certainly, her biog in the programme inflates her slim credentials, coyly failing to mention that her last stage role, in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, came when she was 14.
But, if there's evidence that she's rusty after the 12-year sabbatical, Van Outen does not disgrace herself. OK, so she cannot hold a candle to the effortless charisma of musical veterans Clarke Peters as Billy and Susannah Fellows as Mama Morton. Both generate more heat with the arch of an eyebrow than their new colleague does when shimmying from head to toe. There is something sanitised, too, about the sassiness with which Van Outen seeks to inject her jailbird alter ego. She cuts a scrawny figure next to the toned bodies of the dancers, and struggles to make the leap from her trademark Carry On naughtiness to the killer sex appeal Roxy Hart ought to exude.
But she has a passable Monroe-ish purr and a likeable eagerness to please, while the flaws in her performance can be ascribed to Walter Bobbie's production as a whole."Let's go to hell in a fast car!" says one character - and I wished the show would. The jazz music's fantastic, the staging crisp and funny, the story juicily cynical but it is all got to be louder and sleazier, less slick and more human. There is nothing here you could not invite your granny to see - if she has not already booked her tickets, to see that nice young lady off the telly.
Booking to September 29. Box office: 020-7344 0055.
