Chicago (New Theatre, Oxford and tour)

Though written in 1975, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s smokin’ hot jazz age tale of criminality and celebrity has hardly aged – its satiric swipes at how you can get away with murder as long as you "give 'em the old razzle dazzle" seems if anything more applicable in an age of 24-hour rolling news and the mutually dependent industry of the z-list celebrity and gossip rags.

So there's something almost cruelly cynical about casting fading X Factor winners, Dancing on Ice champs and former-soap stars as its leads, to pout for the paparazzi and despair when their lightbulbs turn away.

With its 1996 revival, Chicago became a long-running, international hit – and this touring production reminds you why. Kander and Ebb zestily have their cake and eat it: drawing on a play by Maurine Watkins, a Chicago journalist who covered women on trial for murder in the 1920s, the show is almost wantonly sexy, revelling in wicked women’s ingenious spirit whilst revealing the press and legal system’s shallow hypocrisy. The flash of showbiz matches the fakery of the courtroom as form and content knit together in a series of vaudeville turns: the sad clown for an overlooked husband, the smooth crooner of a lawyer.

And the music is just irresistible, serving up truly memorable tunes that mix comic cabaret with swinging brass and jazz club sultriness. You can’t help but sing "All That Jazz" all the way home.

Sadly, the performers here are lacking – oh the irony – the x factor: that certain tingle and shimmer. Sophie Carmen-Jones as Velma Kelly, the original sex-pot on the cell block, gives the best performance; she makes for a kittenish vamp, while a frantic hunger underpins her coyly flirtatious little-miss-innocent act.

But Hayley Tamaddon (Coronation Street; Dancing on Ice) as Roxie Hart fails to reel you in: if she’s never more than a grinningly dumb, shallow and fame-seeking murderer, the show becomes just too cynical. John Partridge – fresh outta Celebrity Big Brother – is lizardy as hot-shot lawyer Billy Flynn, but his super-suave delivery goes all the way to stagey. Sam Bailey – 2013 X Factor winner – as prison warden Mama makes good use of her powerful lungs, but seems ill at ease. It is, in general, hard to relax into these performances; you can see too many of the joins.

The same could not be said for the dancers, who thrust and flick and do the splits like they’re in the seediest sex club. They’re tight and taut, but the staging doesn’t make it easy for them to live up to the Bob Fosse-style choreography: the band is onstage in a large slanted box, and while it’s a joy to watch them deliver the lively score, it doesn’t leave much room. Costume designs by William Ivey Long are also now horribly dated: black stretch hipster trousers and lots of skin-tight, see-through black nylon makes the cast look like they’ve been dragged backwards through New Look and Ann Summers circa 1996. It’s bizarrely distracting.

There are moments where the whole show lifts – an uncanny number where Billy Flynn controls Roxie like a ventriloquist’s dummy comes off perfectly, and the final show trial is similarly buoyant, revelling in its own staginess with slick choreography. It's currently underpowered, but this Chicago may yet find its razzle-dazzle.

Chicago runs at the New Theatre, Oxford until 20 February and then tours.