Kiss Me Kate, Victoria Palace, London

The greatest shrew on earth

Watching Michael Blakemore's production of Kiss Me Kate, you keep thinking: it just can't get any better than this. And then, lo and behold, it does. The show tops its personal best so often that, by the end, the audience floats out of the theatre on a wave of unalloyed joy. Cole Porter's musical – a wonderfully witty war report on the off- and onstage fights of a couple of luvvie divorcees, now touring in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew – has no message of any kind. It has nothing to declare but its own blissful enjoyability and wicked showbiz knowingness, and in this version, which moves with a matchlessly cheeky verve and velocity, it makes that declaration loud and clear.

The production opened in New York in 1999, winning a Tony award for best musical revival. And dammit, it even manages to make some significant improvements to the original. It's a hilarious touch, for example, to reinvent the stage diva's stuffy fiance as a humourless US general and fraudulent "family values" fanatic and to have him join Lilli in a deliriously daft duet of "From this Moment On", performed here like a mad military march. (Until you've heard a blimp booming lines like "No more blue songs/ Only whoop-de-doo songs", you haven't really lived.) The change allows for some great new gags, and also brings home more pointedly why, for all his faults, Lilli's ex-husband is a much better bet.

Kathleen Marshall's exhilarating choreography pulsates with impish eroticism, and not just in the show-stopping "Too Darn Hot" routine, a protracted sizzler – fronted by the liquid-hipped Nolan Frederick – that leaves the dancers flopping to the floor with exhaustion and the audience levitating to the ceiling with delight. It's there, too, in the tongue-in-cheek raunch of a stocking-strip and grape-treading sequence and in the amazing acrobatics of Michael Beresse who, like some amorous Olympic gymnast, flings himself up a triple-tiered backstage stairway to reach Nancy Anderson's deliciously funny Lois. Playing that wide-eyed gold-digger, Anderson rips the theatre apart, as she lurches archly between the demure and the dirty-minded, the brazen and the butter-wouldn't-melt in the terrific "Always True to You (In My Fashion)".

If Porter's songs have a drawback, it's that they tend to be humorous but static variations on a single conceit. They don't, as songs in musicals officially should, effect change within the characters. Blakemore, however, brilliantly masks this defect, building dramatic variety with a battery of false endings, surprise resumptions and ceaselessly inventive business.

For my taste, the imposing Marin Mazzie strays too far into grotesquerie as the termagant Lilli/Kate, even delivering, in "I Hate Men", a graphic mime of the agonies of childbirth that would not look amiss in a Howard Barker play. But, with his warm, radiant baritone and natural gift for fast, unforced comedy, Brent Barrett is perfection as Fred/Petruchio, offering a winning send-up of macho swagger that only enhances his strong romantic appeal.

Well, what are you waiting for? Hie thee to the Victoria Palace Theatre and "Brush Up Your Porter", for, as the song says, this is "truly wunderbar".

To 9 Feb; 020-7834 1317.