Dubarry was a Lady, Her Majesty's Theatre, London

Cole Porter's 1939 musical is, for this transplanted New Yorker, a blissful wallow in nostalgia for those dear old days of theatrical smut. When movies and radio in the USA were heavily censored, the theatre, unlike here, was the one performance medium in which, to adapt the title of another Porter show, anything went. Unlike prim official morality, it acknowledged the pungent realities of life, especially after 10 years of the Great Depression. "Baby,'' La Dubarry earnestly tells another girl, "you wouldn't cheapen a beautiful thing like love by giving it away for nothing.''

The show starts in the seedy Club Petite, where Louis, a washroom attendant, worships the singer May Daly. When he downs a Mickey Finn meant for a rival he moves on to the Petit Trianon and dreams he is Louis XV of France. But Louis is such a shnook, he never even gets to make it with May, now the guttersnipe countess Madame Dubarry, in his own dream.

The show pulsates with frustrated desire in its unsettling rumbas and lyrics and book (by Buddy de Sylva and Herbert Fields). I can only suppose that, when the Lord Chancellor okayed the show for London, he thought Louis's remark, "I read Esquire with one hand'' referred to the magazine's weight, and that Dubarry's question "Do you do double-entry, dear?'' was about bookkeeping.

In the Ethel Merman part in this concert performance, Louise Gold nods to her predecessor without bowing to her. With a big, warm voice and a majestically playful manner, Gold – you'd call her Junoesque except Juno never had any fun – is more womanly than Merman but, like her, puts the hot numbers across by being joyous and powerful rather than sexy. One would call it a triumph of confidence if one spoke of a confident tank. But as Louis, Desmond Barrit is pinched and wan, playing only the character's timidity and wistfulness without the almost surreal goofiness it requires (the role was created by the great clown Bert Lahr). He doesn't loosen up until the final duet, Porter's glorious high-stepping, buttock-bumping, chicken-clucking, hootin' and hollerin' number "Friendship''.

Though the chorus girls have, rightly, been chosen for their voices rather than other talent or equipment, the soubrette part is taken by the delightful Lauren Ward, an American making her London debut. In her chirpy way with dialogue, her crisp delivery of the lyrics and her angular comic dancing, Ward shows an effortless grasp of the style of the period. One longs to see her, like Gold, in a full-dress production, but, alas, she is over here to appear in, if you'll pardon the expression, The Vagina Monologues, while Gold is nightly belting out the great hits in Mamma Mia. At times the Great Depression had something to be said for it.

Final show Sun (020-7494 5400)