Theatre - Sheridan Morley applauds a cast for managing not to giggle at their lines

To understand what has gone so horribly wrong over here with a musical that has been running triumphantly in Paris these many months, we need to understand something about the French and musicals, which is basically that they hate them. Only in Paris has West Side Story ever flopped, not to mention their very own Les Miserables, whose authors were so depressed by their fellow countrymen's attitude to big band shows that they both settled over here.

Only a nation that has never really set any store by Leonard Bernstein or Jerome Robbins or Stephen Sondheim, not to mention Shakespeare, could have come up with this rock-pop shambles, one best summarised by Romeo as he leaves Juliet's bed after their fateful encounter. "That," he says unconvincingly, "was the night of my life." Somehow I think Shakespeare put it rather better.

In an almost entirely unknown cast and (over here, at least) creative team, only our man for all musical seasons, Don Black, carries any weight; and it is hardly his fault that he has not here been able to do what Herbert Kretzmer did with Les Mis, not so much a translation as a total rewrite. Black has, I suspect, stuck pretty closely to the original Gerard Presgurvic score, since the lyrics are far too terrible to be his own.

David Freeman's production is a gala evening of high campery, in which songs are not so much sung as shouted out across the orchestra pit by a cast commendably able not to giggle at such lines as "When will they get it in their heads/That they will never leave their beds?", a couplet that sort of summarises the tragic finale an hour or three before we reach it.

David Roger's Verona set looks like a nightclub in Barcelona after a rough evening, characters are introduced by lines like "This is Romeo and that's his friend Mercutio", while the Prince of Verona's near-immortal "Two households with an ancient grudge/Find they really cannot budge" tells you more than you really need to know.

As a schools project for deaf pre-teenagers who have somehow missed out on the story, the musical has a certain relentless efficiency, and Juliet comes complete with her own Barbie-doll bedroom that sometimes floats through the night sky like something out of ET. The lady who plays the Nurse, Jane McDonald, made her name a couple of years ago on a TV documentary about life aboard a cruise liner, which is presumably why she plays her hitherto-great role like a stewardess aboard the QE2 after a long shift.

As the screenwriter William Goldman once said: in showbusiness, nobody knows anything. Who would have thought, just a year ago, that the biggest West End comedy hit of the new century would turn out to be a couple of eccentric young comics, plus a vertically challenged stooge and a mystery guest star, performing a tribute to Morecambe and Wise of considerable eccentricity, not least because nobody on stage bears the faintest resemblance in voice or appearance to the two great telly-comics or even seems to recall much of what they did?

But The Play What I Wrote, back at Wyndham's in triumph before moving on to Broadway early next year, is a work of considerable genius, and one that relies on precisely the same old vaudeville traditions in which Eric and Ernie themselves found their origins and each other. The first half of the show is now, sadly, a tribute to the great choreographer Irving Davies, who died three weeks ago at 76. Davies created a breathtakingly funny parody of old Hollywood musical routines which ends with the meeting of Carmen Miranda and Esther Williams, played of course by the unlikely lads Sean Foley and Hamish McColl.

On the original first night, Ralph Fiennes was the guest star who gets caught up in the "play what I wrote", a second-act farrago of the French Revolution and its celebrated Scarlet Pimple. This time around, Roger Moore did the honours, but yet another of the tricks here is that neither star guest was or ever will be in the show again. Tomorrow it could be a TV weather forecaster, or for all I know Tony Blair himself, or possibly Jeffrey Archer on day-release.

Moore may only have been the merrier for one night, but in Kenneth Branagh's still wonderfully anarchic and energetic production, the show lives on in all its tacky vaudeville majesty, not only a celebration of the old routines but an explanation of what made them work.

Romeo & Juliet: the musical is at the Piccadilly Theatre, London W1 (020 7369 1744) until 22 February 2003; The Play What I Wrote is at Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2 (020 7369 1736 ) until 4 January 2003

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