Raising Venus from the grave

You can't quibble with Irving Berlin's contention that "There's no business like showbusiness" but even he knew that for every hit there are plenty of "turkeys that you know will fold".

Eleven years ago Ian Marshall Fisher made it his mission to stage "lost musicals", dredging them up from the archives and persuading celebrities to let him plunder their family vaults. He's uncovered more than one turkey but also quite a few golden geese and his latest is his 50th find - One Touch of Venus - a 1943 musical written by the unlikely trio of Kurt "Mack the Knife" Weill, light-verse king Ogden Nash and Woody Allen's favourite wit, SJ Perelman.

"The great thing is," enthuses Marshall Fisher, "it's a musical comedy, but all these wonderful brains, these wits of the day, worked on it". It started with Weill's discovery of a Victorian novel called The Tinted Venus, based on the Pygmalion myth, which he wanted to turn into a musical vehicle for Marlene Dietrich. He enlisted the Spewacks, a husband-wife writing team, but didn't like their script. Meanwhile Dietrich, who had been quite happy to sit astride a barrel as the alluring Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel, refused the part on the grounds that it was too saucy.

It was pioneering producer Cheryl Crawford who found Nash and Perelman, and replaced Dietrich with Mary Martin, the Broadway bombshell for whom Rodgers and Hammerstein would later write South Pacific, and (for trivia fans) and who later became Larry Hagman's mum.

And Broadway loved it. The songs were great - especially the slinky torch number, Speak Low - and the plot was fabulously frivolous, telling the tale of Whitelaw Savory, an art connoisseur who buys a statue of Venus, only to have his barber Rodney put a ring on the statue's finger and bring the goddess to life. She falls hook, line and sinker for the man who resurrected her - until he starts fantasising about "Stealing kisses in the kitchen / Holding hands while the dishes dry", and she realises how humdrum marriage would be. She hotfoots it to Olympus, leaving the statue for Savory and a living copy of herself for Rodney.

Paradoxically, as Marshall Fisher found, "its success launched its obscurity". Universal bought the film rights, slashed up the script (the museum became a mall and the barber a windowdresser - spot the inspiration for the Eighties blockbuster Mannequin?) and cast Ava Gardner - "and she couldn't sing!" In the end, according to Marshall Fisher, "the film was a big failure".

He's not just rescuing its reputation, he's doing it in style. Previous lost musicals have been stripped-down affairs with a lone piano, but this time Marshall Fisher goes to the Ritz (or, more precisely, the Royal Opera House's shiny Linbury Studio) with a full orchestra and 23 dancers from the Central School of Ballet recreating Agnes de Mille's choreography step by step.

It's his love of authenticity that makes Marshall Fisher's project so exciting. "That's the unique thing about lost musicals. Some of the stuff is so obscure that if you wanted to hear it, you'd have to reconstruct it from the score, or all you'd have was a paragraph in a reference book. One Touch of Venus will sound exactly as it did on Broadway in 1943."