Peggy Sue Got Married, Shaftebury Theatre, London

A dose of sickly, second-hand nostalgia

Much of the current vogue for homesickness, sorry, nostalgia dates back to the mid-Eighties, when Hollywood woke up to the past with the "what if" movies Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married. In the musical version of the latter, its writers Arlene Sarner and Jerry Leichtling again transport us to 1985, where 42-year-old Peggy Sue is about to end her dead marriage. But then she attends her high-school reunion, faints and travels back to her school days, where she confronts the question, if she could live her life over, what would she change? Will she stick with her life and marry mainstream, mindless Charlie, or run off with moody Michael?

It's time travel meets Brief Encounter, though really it wants to be Grease. Only trouble is, we have already had something that wanted to be Grease. It was called Grease 2, and nobody went.

As the curtain rises, Ruthie Henshall's Peggy Sue is singing "Where did we go wrong?" Oh, dear. Everything about the scene is underwritten. She and her mum swap plot information and exit. And so it goes. Andrew Kennedy is a slick Charlie, but late in the show he sings "I've done nothing but love you", and you realise that it's true: through no fault of his own, he really has done nothing else. Meantime, bad boy Michael (the winning Tim Howar) wears black and sneers a lot. The result is that we never engage with anyone, because they don't actually have characters. They're plot positions with lungs. How can we get involved with Peggy Sue if the show fails to dramatise her plight? It feels as if they are staging a synopsis rather than the script.

Sergio Trujillo provides period-style movement, but his choreography never takes the drama (or us) anywhere. It's merely busy, and the mock-pretentious nightclub number is stolen from the inexpressibly superior movie Funny Face. In fact, nearly everything sounds second-hand. Bob Gaudio wrote for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but this music and Leichtling's predictable lyrics sound like rip-offs. "Raw Youth" seems dangerously close to Leiber and Stoller's "I'm A Woman", while "Buzz Buzz" paradoxically sounds like a pumped-up but flat rewrite of "The Telephone Song" from the terrific Sixties musical Bye Bye Birdie. Henshall sings her heart out to impressive effect in "Two Kinds of Fire", but what is something that sounds like an out-take from Bonnie Tyler and Meatloaf doing in a Sixties show?

The real blame lies with Kelly Robinson's generalised direction. The premise had possibilities, so why didn't he rework the show to realise its potential or, at the very least, stage it with the necessary energy and detail? When Charlie sings to Peggy Sue of his love, they're squashed downstage to cover a hidden scene change. Charlie exits, dejected. Henshall is left staring at his back with no script to play. She shrugs and leaves. What is she thinking as she arrives in the wings? My guess is, "Thank God my agent negotiated a seriously high weekly wage... 'cause this ain't gonna be around for very long."

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