Poor score for scorn

Parodies only achieve their aim when the parodist hits sharply home. Forbidden Broadway is a show full of exuberant misses and no real hits. Its creator and writer, Gerard Alessandrini, has attempted to mock a score of musicals and singing stars by inventing new words for famous old songs. Off-Broadway, where the show in various editions has run more than 15 years in tiny theatres, the spitefulness of some of these parodies did not overwhelm their victims because the tone remains cheerfully puerile.

Last night's West End premiere, transferred from the little Jermyn Street theatre where it was admired, did not lack audience members expressing their pleasure to see stars and musicals brought bumpily down to earth by crude satire. The four-strong cast - Sophie Louise Dann, Mark O'Malley, Alistair Robbins and Christine Pedi - are adequate if crude mimics when slipping into the shoes, costumes and voices of those they impersonate.

But they, not the mainly female targets of their scorn, end up looking silly. If you choose to spoof Miss Saigon, Chicago, Rent and Blood Brothers with Petula Clark sending it up and Down Town, you need to find pointed, witty put-downs for seductive scores and books. None are found here. If you attempt to mock Ute Lemper dancing to Bob Fosse-style choreography in that alluring, cynical razzle-dazzle song from Chicago you need more than a wig to make a point. If you scorn the complexity of Sondheim's clever lyrics, it's no good resorting to whimsy. If you want to put down Elaine Paige in her Sunset Boulevard role, is it funny or clever to come on kneeling, as though to mock Paige's shortness and complaining "I'm not small. The set's got bigger?"

Where Alessandrini belittles singers rather than famous musicals there's a distasteful, if mildly comic impression of someone taking aim at the walking wounded. Christine Pedi cruelly captures Liza Minelli in garbled incoherence and Carol Channing is reduced to not more than a smudged lipstick figure of fun. But the broad and sometimes surreal spoofing, whether bringing on Ethel Merman to energise Phantom of the Opera or when making Les Miserables even more absurd than in the original, cuts little ice with me. On a bare stage decorated with an interior, silver-strip curtain and a piano-playing accompanist, Phillip George's production achieves a racy pace but packs light punches.

Until 4 September. Box office: 0171 369 1740.

Forbidden Broadway