This co-production with Chichester Festival Theatre (where it was reviewed in July) has all the ingredients. It was Cole Porter’s biggest hit musical, and deservedly so, with numbers such as “Another Op’nin’, Another Show” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”. It derives, as so many golden-age musicals seem to, from Shakespeare, in this case a feud between exes during the out-of-town try-out of a musical version of The Taming Of The Shrew… oh, and that’s another one: it’s a show about a show. And Trevor Nunn’s revival is packed with talent, from the statuesque and titanium-lunged Hannah Waddingham as diva Lilli, relishing every moment of furious coloratura, and Clive Rowe as one of a brace of intruding gangsters (the Old Vic’s gain is Hackney Empire’s loss, as the latter’s panto is once again this year without one of the best dames in the business), through stalwarts including Adam Garcia and David Burt to the likes of Jason Pennycooke who deserves to be as widely known by the public at large as he is in the profession, and here gets to take the lead on “Too Darn Hot”.
    
Why, then, does it turn out merely so-so? In July, Antony Thorncroft wrote of director Trevor Nunn’s “ingrained meticulous attention to detail”. Too many directors seem not to trust their material; Nunn is a master at doing so, but to the point where it can become a danger. Here, it gets him coming and going: in the spoken segments, he allows a natural pacing to let matters drag when some zing might better be injected; with the musical numbers, he goes all-out to milk every last drop of zing to the point where that too can become paradoxically tiring. (I was feeling dubious when the first verse of “Another Op’nin’” was given its fourth rendition, but a fifth was to come; the staging includes planned encores of “Always True To You In My Fashion” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”.) What with one thing and another, a show which in its 1953 movie version runs for an hour and 50-odd minutes here comes in at a whisker under three. It is possible to have too much of a good thing, especially when that thing is merely good and frustratingly not quite excellent. It’s too darn lukewarm.
     
Written for the Financial Times.