Cliff falls flat

Anyone pining for the good old days when West End musicals were as respectable as one of the Queen's garden parties, as wholesome as a week at a healthfarm and no more arousing than a hot chocolate night-cap, is in for a rare treat.

Sir Cliff Richard, a taste of whose voice and a mere glimpse of whose person still brings middle England girls of all ages out in quivers of delight, has been packaged as an anthology musical. Unfortunately Cliff himself has resisted the chance of singing his way through all those chart- toppers that made him a sex symbol.

So Mike Read, the disc jockey, together with Trevor Payne, who also blandly directs, has hit upon a format which offers three dogged Cliff-impersonators - Ricky Aron, Miles Guerrini and Jimmy Jemain - indifferently singing their way through hits such as The Young Ones, Congratulations and Summer Holiday.

Choreographer Simon Shelton and the company of dancers inject a little dynamism - but not until the jubilant finale is there any real zing.

It's a long journey from the Fifties, when the pretty boy, aspirant rock'n'roller was bizarrely condemned as a threat to decency, to his recent remodelling of the Lord's Prayer as a soulful song.

And for those whose appetite for Cliff's songs make them seem anorexic by comparison with his fans, the evening was as long, dull and flat as a day-trip loitering on the Norfolk Broads.

Rock stars are usually rebels, exuding aggressive masculinity. Young Cliff, the songs remind you, offered instead those boring old virtues - respectability, conformity and primness.

The scene in Cliff The Musical is 2020, the stage lit with garish neon and beset by film projections. Lord Cliff of Weybridge, dressed in tennis shorts and looking not a decade over 50, is quite convincingly impersonated by Read himself and stands poised to celebrate his 80th birthday at a health farm.

From this perspective the superstar looks back in happiness to his lost youth, or rather lost youths: since Cliff has clung to youthfulness with the ardour of a born-again Peter Pan it takes three singers to mark his younger years.

But none of them quite captured the quality of early Cliff, who was neither hot nor cool, but always neat and warm enough to heat his female followers: then and now gay men tended to despise him.