Gondoliers

I'm all for new talent arriving in the West End, and for new approaches to old works; but Gondoliers isn't the way to do either. Yet another attempt to launch a modern reclamation of an old Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, this one fails on most counts, whether to honour the original or to make something original from it.

The template, of course, for this kind of work remains the 1980s Broadway reworking of The Pirates of Penzance, which for some reason is always called the Joe Papp version, even though the late, great founder of the Public Theatre there was merely its producer, not its adaptor or director. (This version, in an Open Air production vibrantly restaged by Ian Talbot last year, returns to Regent's Park later in the summer, prior to a national tour).

But this reworking won't get to Ealing Broadway, let alone Broadway. For a few years now, Gondoliers' director/choreographer John Doyle has been forging a new way of doing musicals, in which he has his casts double up as the band (and in this case, triple up in the parts they're called to play). In these budget-conscious times, there's a certain charm to watching a tiny company of eight juggle so many disciplines, but the result is more ingenuous than ingenious. Too often, too, the musical backing is reduced to mere keyboards, and the singing quality is negligible.

But then the musical adaptation of Sarah Travis' works to reduce Sullivan's delightful melodies to mere ditties, and Gilbert's lyrics seem barely to have been retained. The show is so strenuously determined to rework the action to fit a new concept - which has the action revolve around three Mafia families who converge at the Gondola Restaurant in Maida Vale's Little Venice - that there is little room for the original.

In this version, a Venetian mafia family boss dies, and the Godmother is left to pursue his only heir - missing for 25 years - who is believed to be with the Palmieri family in London. Meanwhile, the Cacciattoros, from Chicago, are also looking for him, since their daughter, Cassilda, had been secretly married to him at the tender age of six months.

The proceedings become so laboured and confused that a dot matrix sign on stage has to be called into service to identify key plot points. With everything in quotation marks - every time the word "family" is mentioned they are literally demonstrated - or otherwise underlined, italicised and highlighted, this is not a subtle, clever or engaging evening.

Mark Shenton