THEATRE / Sugar and spice: Paul Taylor reviews How About Alice? at the New Grove Theatre

The police, gloating reports inform us, found a photograph of a naked boy during a raid of Michael Jackson's family home in LA. They'd have had a field day in the rooms of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Christ Church maths don known to generations of children as Lewis Carroll. In the mock Wonderland-like trials towards the end of How About Alice? (a new musical by Marianne Cook and Henry Goldberg), Dodgson is accused of possessing stacks of negatives of little girls, some of them scantily clad or nude. Later, he is seen adjusting his will, ordering that certain negatives be erased after his death for the sake of the families concerned. As Oliver Darley reads out the list of four-figure numbers, pernickety repression buckles under the weight of revived emotion.

Musicals about Victorian paedophilia are not exactly 10 a penny, so How About Alice? looked an intriguing prospect. Dodgson's position on little girls was precisely the opposite of that taken by Maurice Chevalier in Gigi; for him, the famous song would have to be rewritten - 'Thank heavens for little girls / But little girls get bigger every day' - a trickier sentiment to express in a show, even one that was musically and lyrically less predictable than this.

The subject of Dodgson's truncated devotion to Alice Liddell, the Dean's daughter and his junior by 20 years, has been treated in a fine Dennis Potter film, Dreamchild. The perspective there, though, was particularly compelling - Alice, at 80, replaying her childhood memories and suddenly understanding with the force of revelation what the little girl had only obscurely recognised: that the tormented Dodgson loved her.

How About Alice? by contrast, lacks either novelty of angle or strong central epiphany. As chorus to the proceedings, Dodgson's beefy college scout (Andrew Jeffers) keeps giving us the lowbrow low-down on 'Mr D'. His matey aspersions on dons' lack of commonsense and the complacent banality of his own ditties, 'Love makes rainy days sunny / Love makes your nose all runny', would certainly act as a flattering foil to foibles worse than platonic paedophilia, conducted through brainy, high-spirited nonsense and the lens of a not too intrusive camera.

Staged by Knight Mantell on a set festooned with huge playing cards and chess pieces, the musical seeks psychological clues in Carroll's work. Reunited in his imagination, Dodgson and Alice eventually jump through the looking-glass, and sing about the emotional appeal of a back-to-front world where day is night and wrong is right. Rather obscuring the age gap that is crucial to their relationship, Darley and Abigail Lee as Alice look like close contemporaries, but they sing with a fine clarity and are genuinely moving in the stiff, pained scene where the now-married Alice revisits and is met with estranging politeness.

''Are they kissable?' Dodgson wrote to one mother when inviting her daughters to tea. Cue for a song? Alas, no, this musical goes for easier options. You wonder what the woman wrote back.

How About Alice? runs until 4 Dec at the New Grove, NW1, 071-383 0925.

(Photograph omitted)