Romeo and Juliet - The Musical, Piccadilly Theatre, London

Bland Europop drowns out Shakespeare's lovers

The great Sophie Tucker used to sing a song entitled "Fifteen Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong''. It's a statistic that might be queried by anyone familiar with French taste in home-grown contemporary musicals. Who can erase the memory of that the-bells-are-ringing-for-me-and-my-hump Notre Dame de Paris or the sumptuously empty Lautrec ("And when your legs refused to grow/Into your fantasy you'd go ... )? Perhaps something gets lost in the translation.

Undaunted by the reception of these predecessors, a mega-hit French musical version of Romeo and Juliet, with a score by the top-selling composer Gerard Presgurvic, has landed on the stage of the Piccadilly Theatre. Le Tout Paris raved about it. Will it also be the toast of London – the first show since Les Mis to cross the Channel and not meet a critical or box office Waterloo?

I somehow don't think so. Here's the shoddy deal. Unlike West Side Story or the Baz Lurhmann movie, this version of Romeo and Juliet (directed by David Freeman) is too lazy either to rethink the story in modern terms or to apply some historical imagination.

The result? An unholy mess. On the one hand, flimsy flats depicting a Giottoesque Verona and the plot line cleave quite closely to Shakespeare. On the other, feuding gangs dangle from opposed blocks of scaffolding like punky Kids from Fame, while the score reduces everything to the same level of Europop banality.

Competition for the worst moment caused by these contradictions is intense. But a strong contender would be the equivalent of the balcony scene, staged with Juliet (a strongly sung but anachronistically brattish Lorna Want) in what looks like a budgerigar's cage.

Andrew Bevis's girlishly pretty, hollering Romeo manages to penetrate this eyrie. "They don't know what they're saying/This love of ours is staying'' duet the couple, in lyrics by Don Black that can't be accused of poetic over-ambition.

As the hero leaves, Juliet impatiently barks, "Find a place. Get a priest. And send me a message." The only surprise is that she doesn't add "and put a down payment on a three-piece suite''.

There's a Friar (Sevan Stephan) who, in the tomb scene, has a musical crisis of faith fit to wake the dead and a Nurse (Jane Lawrence, who found fame in TV's The Cruise) who veers between being a vocal belter and a boring sub-Coronation Street Northerner.

The book (by David Freeman and Don Black) gives her a speech to Juliet that compares having a husband to owning an old piece of furniture: "You don't have to love it. You just have to give it a quick polish every now and then.''

To adapt a line from West Side Story: "There's a place for this. But I'm too polite to tell you where.''