42nd Street

They do it with mirrors

They do it with mirrors. And sequins, stairs, flounces, tapshoes - the whole hip-hooray and ballyhoo are here in the UK Productions presentation of 42nd Street. Loud - the decibel level is slightly unbalanced due to a delayed ferry - brash and a riot of over-acting, the show is the archetypal Broadway musical. It comes with accumulated credits (original direction and dances by Gower Champion, for example, from the New York production by David Merrick) and shines with all the Tin-Pan Alley glitz associated with the genre at its best.

So George May's choreography, especially in the continuous patterning of stage movement, is never less than good and is sometimes brilliant. Musical director Richard Holmes has a good band, and the singing exceeds the soubrette standard implicit in shows of this kind. This is particularly the case in James Smilie's version of Lullaby of Broadway. It's his best moment as Julian Marsh, and he can't be blamed for holding on to it before the song explodes into a whole-cast number.

42nd Street, with music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Al Dubin, is the stage version of the 1933 Warner Bros film, telling the important Depression story of how opportunity knocks a young hoofer into stardom. Here everything works at a very fast clip, with tap-shoes clicking like demented castanets to keep up with the pace set by director George May; scene-changes, costumes and lighting all move in a seamless fusion of form, colour and sound. The performances are so exaggerated that it's impossible to say how good these actors are at anything except this kind of thing, but at this kind of thing they're terrific.

Runs until Saturday night

Mary Leland

Mary Leland is a contributor to The Irish Times specialising in culture