So nearly a hit

Just So
Chichester Festival Theatre

One thing the success of The Lion King and Cats has proved, is that there is a keen market for musicals featuring anthropomorphic animals.

The composer/lyricist team of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe is certainly partial to this sub-genre. They won an Olivier Award in 2000 for the duckling-themed Honk!, having previously tackled Rudyard Kipling's much-loved Just So Stories.

The original piece was subsequently revised, yet Just So remains frustratingly episodic. The stories are largely self-contained units, which led Stiles and Drewe to single out the Elephant's Child as the unifying focus.

En route to confront the malignant crab Pau Amma at the "great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River", this public-spirited young pachyderm, played by the amiable Richard Dempsey, encounters a host of strange beasts.

Some of these instalments are far more successful than others and the best allow us to forget about the lack of overall narrative thrust. What is an unqualified triumph is the sinuous way in which the inventively costumed actors represent rather than resemble the creatures.

Thus Giraffe and Zebra (the fortuitous pairing of Alexis Owen-Hobbs and Akiya Henry) are dozy dolly birds, all hairstyles and make-up and near escapes from the big cats, whereas Nicolas Colicos's Rhino is a Billy Bunter-type school bully in a tootight grey uniform.

Many of the cast are concurrently starring in Chichester's other musical, Out of This World, and here as there the ensemble routines work better than individual turns. Drewe, who also directs, has penned lyrics that are a delight of rhyme and wordplay - "Is it true bad worker bees will always blame their tools?" asks the wonderful Silly Questions - even if the songs themselves are unmemorable and include an unfortunate arrangement of the poem If.

If the storyline were stronger, this would be an undoubted family hit.

In rep until 25 September. Information: 01243 781312.