Peter Pan, Royal Festival Hall, London

There's no bite, flight or insight in the droll but shallow new musical version of Peter Pan at the Royal Festival Hall

A Peter Pan where the hero doesn't get to fly around on a wire is a bit of a contradiction – equivalent to an Esther Williams movie marooned on dry land or a Tarzan flick in which the loin-clothed beefcake fails to swing around the trees. That, though, is what is on offer in the new musical adaptation of Barrie's play at the Royal Festival Hall. Instead of a truly airborne Peter and a Darling clan who cause a lurch in the audience's stomach by levitating their way to Neverland, we get a boring simulation of flight with actors bending up and down on pedestals while a blue cloth is whipped about in front of them. You feel like climbing onto your seat and parodying them: "Flying? Look – anyone can do it!

Directed by Ian Talbot, the show – which uses Susannah York as a narrator – seems to be stuck at an uneasy point of evolution: it's neither a concert version nor a fully self-convinced staging. The sparse scenery consists of cut-outs of black and white engravings which give the proceedings a flimsy, untextured feel and, on opening night, the effects were none too secure.

The Wendy House chimney improvised from John's top-hat soon quit smoking and plummeted to the floor, provoking Peter into mouthing a very visible "Damn!" to the Lost Boys. The crocodile with the craving for Captain Hook is just a huge, toothy cavity projected round the false proscenium – in fact, all gob and no dinner. This is rather disappointing as it means we can't be in at the kill. Richard Wilson – who should be graduating from One Foot in the Grave to "Both Feet in A Croc" – merely jumps off the back of the stage to a blood-curdling amplified howl.

Bedecked in the foppish black and white finery bestowed on him by dandy costume designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, a beauty-spotted Wilson looks as if he's wandered in from the world of Restoration Comedy and about as capable of keeping a pirate crew on its toes as Julian Clary. It's curious casting, not least because it blunts the comic contrast with his side-kick Smee, played here in the best performance of the evening by the wonderful David Bamber who – flat-vowelled and forever knitting – is the kind of camp Northern chatterbox you might get in one of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads.

The score is by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, who had a Christmas hit at the National a couple of years ago with Honk!. It's musically uninspired, but lively and boasts lyrics that are crammed with witty word-play and droll, intricate rhymes. "Who put the 'jolly' in Jolly Roger?/ Who put the treasure in the chest?/ Who's more artful than the Artful Dodger?/ Who's more scary than the Marie Celeste?" ask the pirates in their sycophantic eulogy of Hook.

The Lost Boys are also very charming – wild-haired would-be toughs who warn us that foolish opponents "soon find to their cost/ That there's been no fight that the Lost Boys lost" – later hilariously converting those rhetorical questions to silly statements in a rousing reprise. James Gillan is a personable, clear-voiced Peter, but neither the staging nor the songs allow him to communicate the full tragic ambivalence of this figure – debarred, in his wilfully arrested development, from the pleasures as well as the penalties of growing up and a spectre at the emotional feast when the Darling children return home. The deeper notes of Barrie's myth aren't heard hauntingly enough in a version which, in more ways than one, fails to achieve lift-off.

To 12 Jan (020-7960 4242)