The title role in Cy Coleman’s bio-musical about 19th-century America’s greatest showman and self-proclaimed (in the show, at least) “Prince of Humbug” tends to attract performers talented in music and comedy alike, who are both beloved entertainers and energetic performers. Its 1980 Broadway première featured Jim Dale, the West End version a year later offered Michael Crawford, and a British tour a few years ago, Brian Conley.

Comedian, panellist and actor Marcus Brigstocke has the required warmth in abundance – he banters with the audience and chuckles with rather than at them – but falls down, sometimes literally, in other areas. His singing voice is sweet but not strong, and on press night the sound design had sorted neither the volume nor timbre of Brigstocke’s amplification. A patter number like the “Museum Song” is no fun if you can’t hear, never mind make out, the patter. Nor is he terribly physical: most of the extreme cavorting is delegated to members of the ensemble, and the one routine which can’t really be outsourced – a tightrope walk – saw three failed attempts on opening night and was completed by holding a sidekick’s hand as a stabiliser.

Staging this revival in a small-to-medium space such as the Menier might have been hoped to minimise Brigstocke’s physical insufficiencies, because there’s only so much you can do in there, but in practice it becomes one more deficit amongst others. (And I repeat, Brigstocke himself is so likeable that I feel as if I’m drowning a puppy for making these criticisms.) Sometimes director Gordon Greenberg and his team come up with imaginative solutions: the midget General Tom Thumb is played by a full-size actor between two “Beefeaters” on stilts and the elephant Jumbo represented, in proportion to Thumb, by a huge partial trunk and two massive lower legs. The virtually non-stop exuberance of the cast cannot be faulted, nor the performances of Laura Pitt-Pulford as Barnum’s humbug-free yet loving wife Chairy or Celinde Schoenmaker as “the Swedish nightingale” soprano Jenny Lind. It’s just that you can’t reproduce the feeling of a three-ring circus in a space not quite big enough for one and with a principal who makes a fine ringmaster but can’t keep up with the “speshes”.

Written for the Financial Times.