Ever since he handled the 1997 Broadway opening of Cy Coleman’s 1990 musical, the venerable director Michael Blakemore has wanted to stage it in London. Twenty years later Blakemore, now aged 88, has rung the curtain up in the 240-seat Southwark Playhouse. It shows his customary care and sensitivity, but I fear the intervening years have not been kind.

It was already something of a period piece when first written, co-writer Ira Gasman’s idea being to portray the seamy community around New York’s 42nd Street before the district was sanitised. Blakemore’s production is sympathetic, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that every single female character in the piece is a prostitute (all right, one progresses from go-go dancer to porn movie star), while almost every male character is nominally a pimp or hustler of some kind, but in effect a low-rent gentleman of leisure. The sexism is not interrogated; indeed, when the women enter the annual Hookers’ Ball one by one in their slinky finery, we are implicitly encouraged to look on them as objects in exactly the same way.

The subject matter itself is a little more complex. What it amounts to is that, without a twist of some kind – the Runyonesque cartooning of Guys And Dolls, say, or the slight whitewashing that Coleman himself gave to Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria when turning it into Sweet Charity – stage musicals involving sex workers are always likely to seem patronising, like a kind of slumming in song. It can be avoided, but Coleman’s jaunty-with-a-touch-of-soul score and Gasman’s predictable lyrics must surely always have been on the quaint side for such a topic.

As I say, though, it’s a strong staging. Musical stalwarts Sharon D. Clarke and Cornell S. John are both first-rate as the older characters, and T’Shan Williams responds well to the challenge in her central role as Queen, the prostitute enmeshed in various men’s schemes. As for the narrator-figure, though, something makes me think the emptiness in his eyes is attributable to actor John Addison rather than the character Jojo. And however much brio, nearly three hours (plus a further half-hour due to opening-night delays) is a long time to feel uneasy about the entire basis of a show.

Written for the Financial Times.