These charming men

In a spacious rehearsal room in Hammersmith, a string quartet is plucking its way through one of the most gloriously gloomy back catalogues in pop. An international cast - four female, two male - take turns to sing along.

Sometimes the songs sound like the 1980s originals, sometimes they sound like show tunes. An American in shorts and glasses stalks the room, exhorting the cast to sing their own way - while sometimes suggesting that, actually, the tune won't work unless the original phrasing is followed exactly.

'There are three things happening simultaneously in these songs,' he explains to cast and quartet, 'jungle rhythms, English parlour music and Motown.'

Welcome, then, to The Smiths: The Musical - aka Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others. It's a stage show, it has a narrative, it strings together the songs of an extinct pop band. But Mamma Mia! it's not.

Rather than try to cram these indie anthems into a cheerfully cheesy storyline - men called William being told It Was Really Nothing; women called Sheila being exhorted to Take A Bow - creators Andrew Wale and Perrin Manzer Allen are using the originals to trace their own stories of romance and regret.

For, despite the very English reference points in Morrissey's darkly funny lyrics, the songs are often vague about their protagonists. Sex and sexuality, age and nationality are up for grabs. 'That's partly why the songs are useful to us,' says director Wale, a thin, steady Englishman.

'They can support all the different obsessions we have, rather than being confined to saying "this is a song about Sheila bowing" or whatever.'

Musical director Manzer Allen, the aforementioned American, adds: 'The story we've ended up with is not the story we thought we were going to tell. Part of the fun is working these things through with the cast. We've dropped songs because the person we wanted to sing them didn't find it relevant to them.'

Hard to imagine a performer in We Will Rock You decline to sing Radio Ga Ga because it 'isn't relevant to me'. But then The Smiths' popularity has always been predicated on their outsiderdom. So Wale and Manzer Allen - together known as The Anonymous Society - are not expecting to conquer Broadway.

They first had the idea ten years ago while working on musicals in Berlin but dismissed it as a drunken wheeze. Then, five years ago, they scored a Fringe smash with Jacques Brel's Anonymous Society, which gave fresh theatrical life to the late Belgian's torch songs.