Thoroughly sweet Millie

It is high nostalgia time, with the sound of the Jazz Age striking up again, the sight of dancers wildly into the Charleston and the spectacle of flapper girls glad to put virtue behind them.

This farcical, fairytale dream of a musical, based on the famous, Oscar-winning Julie Andrews film, seductively whisks us back to naughty Twenties' New York, when pleasure was the coming thing.

Amanda Holden, in a yellow dress almost long enough to hide her legs and with morals short enough to put cash before love, enthusiastically plays Millie Dillmount, an adventuress on the loose in the thoroughly sinister Hotel Priscilla from where girls mysteriously vanish.

Having sensibly deserted Kansas, pseudofeminist Millie arrives in town determined to marry a rich man and to hell with romance. There is no traditional mooning over men - until true love strikes.

The show was a hyper-hit on Broadway last year. But although this romantic, high-energy entertainment, with its tremendous dancing, vivacity and jocular hedonism, captures the style and mood of the roaring Twenties, I am uncertain it will triumph here. For unlike Cole Porter's glorious Anything Goes, Thoroughly Modern Millie lacks a crucial ingredient. It misses out on hit songs and music that you come out whistling or humming.

Jeanine Tesori's jazzy, jaunty music goes with a swing - especially in How The Other Half Lives - but not that much more. Quite the wittiest, cleverest number, The Speed Test, with typists tap-dancing in their seats, has music by Sullivan. I left the theatre hymning the attractions of a fast decade, its hectic dancing styles and devil-may-care attitude to life and love.

Richard Morris's original book has been touched up a little by Dick Scanlan, but not nearly enough. Thoroughly Modern Millie is far too clean for its own good or ours. Although the musical relies on Millie, chorus girls and actresses at the Priscilla hotel, everyone is absurdly prim and proper. There is no glimpse of cocaine or whiff of opium, no abortion or sexually transmitted disease.

The sinister aspect of the plot, which comes and goes and mainly stays away, is mock-horrid. It involves the white slave trade and Maureen Lipman's weird and wonderful comedy performance as Mrs Meers, the Priscilla hotel's owner.

Masquerading as Cantonese, wearing kimonos and what appear to be knitting needles in her hair, Miss Lipman offers a wickedly amusing parody of an Eastern woman mauling and mispronouncing the English language and snatching girls into the white slave trade.

Against designer David Gallo's unspectacular backcloth of toy-like, neon-lit skyscrapers and art deco patterning, farcical-comic affairs unfold. The dancers are all razzledazzle with energy to Rob Ashford's dashing choreography and helterskelter in a Speak Easy (music from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker).