No hype, just spooky witchcraft

There's something strange about The Witches of Eastwick, the new £4.5 million musical comedy out of the Cameron Mackintosh stable which has a reputation for breeding winners. It has crept up on us.

Although there have already been several previews at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the show has been unaccompanied by the usual media hype, the starry interviews and the inflated promises.

This is the result of a conscious decision by Sir Cameron. "Everyone is fed up with being told this is the best new thing since whatever," he said.

"I feel about this show as I felt about Cats. You cannot explain it up front. It's fresh and different, there's flying the like of which you have never seen before and the public will make up their mind if they want to see it.

"The only ad I have done is to say The Witches is opening and it is a musical comedy, implying, of course, that it is not the movie."

Some might fear that the show would invite unfavourable comparisons with the movie, which starred Jack Nicholson in the role now taken by Ian McShane, not to mention Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer as the witches. Not Sir Cameron.

"We have not had anyone coming out of the theatre saying that," he maintains, adamantly. "You never think of Nicholson or the rest of the cast in the film.

"Our cast are all completely different and there's been a terrific chemistry between them," he adds, enthusing over McShane, back on the West End stage after a 30-year absence, and his multi-talented witches, Joanna Riding, Maria Friedman and American Lucie Arnaz. Nor has he anything but praise for the two American creators of the show, lyricist and book writer John Dempsey and composer Dana P Rowe, who had so impressed him with their show, The Fix.

"They have been fantastic in assimilating suggestions from other people and coming back with material that was very much their own," he said. "It is also entirely in the spirit of John Updike, who wrote the original novel. The book is all John Dempsey but it smells like Updike.

"The basic structure of the show has been there from the first preview. All we are doing is tightening up and adjusting little things here and there," he adds, looking at an official first night that does not happen until 18 July.