Tell Me on a Sunday, Gielgud Theatre, London

One-woman show packs in a whole host of shortcomings

As readers know, I'm no fan of Dawn French, but there was a point during Denise van Outen's one-woman show when I longed for her to make an appearance. That was when van Outen, as the lover of a married man who has promised to leave his wife, meets her nine-year-old future stepdaughter. Capering like a much younger child, van Outen sings, "I'm very you, you're very me," saying that she will be the girl's "second mother" and promising, "I'm gonna spoil you." What Tell Me on a Sunday needed at this point, I felt, was for French to leave her own one-woman show, in which she plays a rejected divorcee, and walk a few yards down Shaftesbury Avenue and on to the stage, to confront van Outen with a Wagnerian blast: "Are you out of your MIND?"

Crassness and sentimentality are familiar bedfellows, of course, especially when they've got Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black to tuck them upbut nothing can obscure the fact that this is a soulless and vulgar show, crafted to appeal to women who will identify with a self-righteous birdbrain and men who like their ladies tall, blond and desperate.

When a love affair goes wrong, Ilford Woman – as we must call her, since she has no name – decides to take off for New York. We never learn what she does for a living, but apparently they want it in New York, and it doesn't matter anyway, since she lives for love. First there's the Hollywood agent, of whom she sings, "Tyler King calls all the shots!/Tyler King gives me the hots!"He lets her down, but is quickly replaced by a fellow who takes boring black-and-white photos of flowers, and then that one gives way to the married chap, who leaves on her answering machine the message: "It would be great to see you." "He seems such a nice man," says our heroine, grasping at straws like they're going out of style. Little wonder that, interested in men only for their ability to feed her ego, she always gets what Black unidiomatically calls "the short end of the stick."

When not absurdly pompous (the grandiose blast during the emotionally low-key opener could serve for the coronation of an empress), Lloyd Webber's music is laughably trite. Van Outen seems a nice girl, but her singing and acting are very averageand I don't even mean "average professional". Her voice is often harshly nasal, and when she turns up the volume (at times, oddly, in the middle of a word), she produces an unattractive and sometimes unintelligible noise.

Matthew Warchus asked to direct it. I can only ask "Why?"