Twist of Lemmon (St James Studio)

There is a wonderful moment near the beginning of this show where, after a joyous compendium of images from Hollywood superstar Jack Lemmon's best loved movies, his son Chris bounds onto the stage and fixes us with that familiar impish grin: the resemblance between the two is almost uncanny. Lemmon Jr has clearly inherited his father's malleable but handsome features and relaxed, easy charm.

I wish therefore I could be more enthusiastic about the somewhat self-indulgent, theatrically inert cabaret Chris Lemmon has created to fête his late father. The overlong first half is primarily an impersonation of the great man himself, with much being made of his thwarted ambition to be a professional musician (Chris is a terrific pianist, and spends much of the evening performing old standards but as Jack). There is little of dramatic interest here: the failure of Jack Lemmon's first marriage, his (apparently fairly slight) neglect of his son as his second marriage loomed, and Jack's struggle with the bottle are dealt with in perfunctory fashion. Long-winded stories – such as when young Chris happened upon the Lemmon's Hollywood neighbour Marilyn Monroe frolicking in a swimming pool with Kennedy – land without a punchline, while Jack's apparent penchant for ending sentences with random gobbledegook becomes enervating, at least as represented here.

As somebody who barely knows one end of a golf club from another, I also found the meandering golfing anecdotes to be mind-bendingly inconsequential, but to be fair many other members of the audience seemed to be enraptured. What unfortunately didn't always seem to be forthcoming was audience laughter which meant that there were some awkward gaps at the end of sections where Lemmon and his director Hugh Wooldridge had perhaps anticipated more of a vocal response.

While perfectly pleasant to sit through, the piece feels shapeless and the marrying of classic songs to stories seems a bit random (for example, for no discernible reason, "Our Love Is Here To Stay" follows an anecdote about a fishing trip that nearly ended in tragedy.) Although the show depicts the horrible moment where Jack was informed by a doctor that he didn't have long to live, and the alcohol-related accident that prompted him to give up drinking forever, the most dramatic moments occur when Chris-as-Jack performs snippets from his best known film scripts.

Despite Chris Lemmon's innate likeability and deft gift for impressions (he does a particularly convincing Walter Matthau), there are few insights here that one couldn't glean by looking at Wikipedia, and Wooldridge's sluggish direction doesn't help. The show runs at a little over two hours but unfortunately feels much longer.

Twist of Lemmon runs at the St James Studio until 18 June.