No great Scott

Nothing exceeds like excess so the booze-soaked, drug-fuelled and supposedly glamorous lives of American novelist F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, those decadent icons of the 20s Jazz Age, really should hold enough power and passion to make a memorable song and dance about.

Not here. Their mutually destructive partnership - he an alcoholic, she a schizophrenic - has inspired an astonishingly bland assessment in this vacuous new British musical.

Sixties songwriters Roger Cook and Les Reed (remember I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, Delilah?) have come up with a whole string of easily rhymed and pleasantly forgettable numbers, while Kit Hesketh Harvey's book tells the Fitzgerald's story in a series of cliched tableaux.

Scott - in novels like the one which has given this show its title - was a merciless and acerbic observer of the fashions and foibles of the rich and famous.

But this biographical pastiche is content to merely give us a glossily superficial view of a tormented celebrity relationship - aspiring author meets and marries a rebellious southern belle who inspired his success before they selfdestructin a welter of competitive hedonism.

There's plenty of period glitter in designer Christopher Wood's sets and costumes and director and choreographer Craig Revel Horwood puts his cast of energetic flappers and social butterflies through a series of bright young things routines, including an hilarious orgy that is as plastic as the cocktail glasses.

In the leading roles, Michael Praed and Helen Anker sing smoothly but are encouraged to give us no more than a couple of ciphers. Praed's facial mask of placid urbanity hardly slips throughout, though Miss Anker does, at least, have the opportunity to put in some very stylish dancing.

It's left to David Burt in the dual roles of Zelda's father and Ernest Hemingway to bring some sense of character to the evening.

But of substance or indeed beauty there is little. And by the end I frankly didn't give a damn about any of them.

Beautiful And Damned