The Kissing Dance – review

An unknown 17-year-old schoolgirl called Sheridan Smith was the hit of Howard Goodall and Charles Hart's musical The Kissing Dance, based on Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, when it was premiered by the National Youth Music Theatre in 1998. Smith's star has been a shooting one since starring in Legally Blonde and now stealing the show in Flare Path, just around the corner from the tiny Jermyn Street theatre where The Kissing Dance is getting its belated professional premiere. As the recent underrated Love Story proved, Goodall's star still waits to blaze brightly, but this one he made earlier is a reminder that he remains one of the most distinctive and undervalued composers in British musical theatre of the last 25 years.

Smith may not be available, but there is plenty of other musical theatre talent on show, including David Burt and Gina Beck, in this charming, if occasionally long-winded, evening full of English pastoral melodies and folk songs. Charles Hart's lyrics are a constant pleasure because they are always thoroughly grown-up and yet full of mischief, as Beck's Kate Hardcastle dresses up as a maid to win the heart of her suitor, Charles Marlow, who has mistaken her father Dick's (played by Burt) country house for an inn.

At two and a half hours, it is perhaps a little overblown, some of the songs are overlong, and Lotte Wakeham's production sometimes feels as if it was designed for somewhere showier than the tiny Jermyn stage. But there is a freshness about the piece, which treats Goldsmith's original with grace and wit, that is enormously appealing. For all the comic absurdities of the plot, this is that rare beast: a genuinely intelligent musical that is performed with evident pleasure by its largely young cast.