Merry Wives - The Musical, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

There's a point early on in Merry Wives - the Musical when Judi Dench, as the Cockney housekeeper Mistress Quickly, bustles on and does a double-take at one of the dinky half-timbered houses that dot the set. Because it's in perspective, she is a head taller than it. For some members of the audience, there will be a less funny dimension to this in-joke, for Dench is also much bigger than the material in this obdurately uninspired and largely mirthless piece.

Paul Englishby has written some excellent music for earlier productions by the director, Gregory Doran. They include Sejanus and All's Well That Ends Well, which brought Dame Judi back to Stratford two winters ago to play the wonderfully wise, wry Countess. She returns to take part in what is supposed to be the Christmas treat of the Complete Works Festival. Unfortunately, almost everything about this venture (where Fifties New Look meets olde worlde Elizabethan) feels ersatz. The songs range from sub-Gilbert and Sullivan, through a whooping hoedown in the "Merry Wives" number, to a tango, Hollywood tap and overblown Lloyd-Webber-like ballads. There isn't an atom of originality in it, and a woeful lack of polish and expertise in the execution.

Sweating in a hairy fat-suit, Simon Callow as Falstaff is a plucky substitute for Desmond Barrit, who had to withdraw through injury. I'm afraid to say, though, that his generalised booming fruitiness put me in mind of a slightly brainier Brian Blessed, while Brendan O'Hea's swaggering Pistol is a dead ringer for Russell Brand. Ironically, given that Ford is played by Alistair McGowan, it is other members of the cast who occasionally make you feel that the RSC has teamed up with Stars in their Eyes.

In Merry Wives, Mistress Quickly surfaces in Windsor, having apparently forgotten that she was the hostess of an Eastcheap tavern in the two parts of Henry IV and that she has a good deal of "previous" with Falstaff. Doran's version beefs up Dench's part and gives her one fairly good song where her trademark cracked voice can come into its own, swerving from rueful reminiscence to defiant rejection of the fat knight who is "full of shit and sack". Falstaff says that, because of his weight, he has an "alacrity in sinking" - and so does one's heart when confronted with great acting and directing talent wasted on such a substandard attempt at high-spirited silliness.

To 10 February (08706 091 110)