Theatre review: Finian's Rainbow

Can a show be so naff it comes out the other end and becomes cool? Actually the answer is no, cool is in no way on the table, but if you're prepared for enough cheese to floor Wallace and Gromit, you could be in for an entertaining night. It seems Finian's Rainbow is revived fairly regularly in America, where tolerance to high levels of begorrah and bejaysus are higher than here - the Union's is the first professional London production for 50 years. And it's actually not surprising, because I imagine this ridiculous bit of Irish-American whimsy from songwriter Burton Lane and writers E.Y Harburg and Fred Saidy is pretty hard to pull off for British audiences. But that's what Phil Willmott has done, funnily enough by failing to do what he'd intended to: The rights-holders had considered letting him do a rewrite for modern audiences, but changed their minds.

Theatre review: Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens

I wouldn't have thought Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens needed a support act but it gets one anyway in Stuart Saint's revival in the bowels of Leicester Square Theatre. A three-piece ukulele-wielding cabaret act entertained us for the first half-hour tonight (I don't know if this part of the show changes nightly.) What should stay the same is the main event, Charlotte Mann, Michael Fidler, Jonathan Croose and Robin Forrest's musical of cosmic camp, a space opera set on the planet Frottage 3. Saucy Jack (Ralph Bogard) runs the eponymous seedy bar and cabaret, although the latter has fewer acts every night: The mysterious Slingback Killer is murdering them one by one, stabbing them with a sequinned high heel. Enter the Space Vixens, an all-female interplanetary police force dedicated to righting wrongs and teaching people the correct path (to the clitoris.) They also seem to have very strong feelings about man-made fibres, although I could never quite figure out if they're for them or against them.