London ed by Michael Billington

When playwright Jonathan Harvey teams up with the Pet Shop Boys on a musical, one expects a modest breakthrough. But all this campy farrago really proves is that the boy-meets-boy musical can be every bit as self-regarding and sentimental as its straight counterpart. Harvey has not over-exerted himself in the matter of plot. His hero,

Straight Dave, gets a job as a leather-knickered dancer in a gay club, has a fling with the boss's daughter Shell and through her lands a contract with a gross record producer. But our Dave's heart is really engaged elsewhere with a soulful Cockney drug pusher called Lee. Sadly their love is short lived. But, even after Lee's early death, Dave gets to fulfill his dream of becoming a hit songwriter. I am all for musical heroes finding true love:

what I cannot stomach is the nauseous pretence that, simply because Lee has had an affection-starved childhood, that makes him a combination of Lycidas and Mother Theresa over whose death we are meant to shed copious tears. Theatrically, we hardly knew the guy. The show's self-regard also emerges in its narcissistic portrait of gay clubland which is presented as a source of hectic vitality, glittering wit and, eventually, druggy destruction. Like his hero, Harvey clearly likes to have it both ways. But the story is just a peg on which to hang 18 Pet Shop Boy numbers. Some of them, such as the opening My Night, have a disco beat that gets under the skin.

Occasionally, as in Nine out of Ten where Dave and Shell engage in post-coital banter in a vertical bed, they have an odd-ball charm. But a theatrical score requires more tonal variety than the Pet Shop Boys are yet masters of and their lyrics are often disappointingly clumsy. They are welcome in a musical theatre desperately in need of new blood: one just hopes next time they get a storyline that stretches their talents. What sinks the show is the crudity of Harvey's book which brings out the worst in everyone.

As a faded, druggy fag-hag icon, Frances Barber goes so far over the top as to be unrecognisable; and it's a measure of the show's crassness that the comparison of her love life to Vietnam "after a lot of protest it was all over in the 70s" -- is regarded as a pearl of wit. And, while Paul Keating is simply nebulous as Dave, Paul Broughton as a loutish record boss and David Langham as his whinnying sidekick give performances of cartoonish grotesquerie.

Gemma Boclinetz's production is also full of sound and fury signifying little. Indeed when David Burt as the gay club owner cried, "You know where the exit is" I felt like taking the hint.