The Merry Widow, Coliseum, London

To say that the veteran director John Copley plays The Merry Widow straight might be a tad misleading. On a Richter scale of camp, his staging scores a nine at very least. But it is traditional. You could hear a palpable sigh of relief as the curtain rose: applause greeted Tim Reed's somewhat rudimentary art nouveau setting and Deirdre Clancy's peachy costumes. It's what you might have expected to see when the Widow first bowed into the Coliseum 50 or so years ago, but with an air of national tour rather than no-expense-spared West End opulence.

Lehar's masterpiece made its mark on the world not just by virtue of its glorious score, but by the way it married old-world charm to a forward-looking knowingness. Its truthfulness in matters of the heart were quite bold for 1904. They are merely amusing now, though Jeremy Sams has spiced up his translation with enough double entendres to keep the titters coming: "A woman with 20 million," observes Count Danilo, "now that's what I call a woman with a good figure." The nadir of all this "I say, I say" smut comes with the showstopper "Women, Women", which Copley and his choreographer, Anthony van Laast, stages as a ragged, roistering chorus line of chauvinistic glee.

Yet Copley has real affection for the piece, and he plays the central will they/ won't they romance like the skilled old hand he is. His problem is that, although Amanda Roocroft and John Graham-Hall are certainly feisty in their approach to Hanna and Danilo's incessant sparring, neither can deliver the vocal glamour that the roles demand. No amount of bathing them in blue-tinted moonlight can disguise that. Still, I liked the way that Roocroft's northern twang underlined the earthy good sense of the farmer's daughter in Hanna, and I warmed to her in the hit number "Vilja", despite the fact that it sits too low and too high for her. The biggest success of the evening was Copley's take on Camille de Rosillon (sung by Alfie Boe), whose desperation to get laid, preferably by Baron Zeta's wife, Valencienne (the lovely Fiona Murphy), had him falling over himself like an eager puppy. As Zeta, Richard Suart played the exasperated cuckold with his usual panache, remarking of his errant wife: "Don't worry, she'll use her magic tongue on him."

And there was Roy Hudd, terrorising the French language as Zeta's clerk, Njegus. Lehar had promised a number to the comic actor who was originally to have played him. Sams made good on that promise and with lines like "A mouthful of coq.... au vin", this particular carry-on was complete.

To 30 May in rep (0871 911 0200)