The Fantasticks, Duchess Theatre

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the musical theatre (Paradise Found, anyone?), along comes The Fantasticks, and we are returned to square one.

How can this be, I hear you asking, given the record book entries clocked up by a Tom Jones/ Harvey Schmidt confection that ran Off Broadway continuously for over four decades before closing in 2002? (It then reopened at a midtown Manhattan venue in 2006.) Well, what may seem charming and whimsical in one context can be wince-inducing in another. Let's just say that I arrived at The Fantasticks infinitely willing to surrender to its naivete, only to feel worn out and weary two-plus hours later: you can only grit your teeth for so long.

Part of the problem, I suspect, rests with material that doesn't really benefit from a "production", which is to say, from any approach beyond the deliberately rough-and-ready, homespun feel that the show has always had in New York. (It's worth noting that this musical never got anywhere near a Broadway house, and rightly so.) A product of a burgeoning Off Broadway that at the time was in gathering thrall to the avant-garde, The Fantasticks is rooted in commedia dell'arte, Beckettian vaudeville, and meta-theatre even as the tale it tells is banal in the extreme. Tart the piece up too much and it cracks under the weight; keep it relatively simple, as director Amon Miyamoto has here, and you risk a crippling self-consciousness.

Miyamato, by all accounts, staged an acclaimed version of this very show in his native Japan, but I can't say that his West End incarnation shows any intuitive feel whatsoever for its highly peculiar demands. Rumi Matsui's platform set, for starters, is basic yet gloomy and lends an air of the funereal before events have even begun. Only at the very end is there a Chagall-like splash of colour that comes entirely out of the blue (well, yellow, actually), the odd neon strip of Rick Fisher's lighting on hand to evoke, however fleetingly, a gondola amidst an environment that for the most part is distressingly drab.

None of this would matter if the performers generated their own sparks, but that is not the case. No doubt unsure how to pitch a tale of young love that devolves in the second act into a creepy variant on The Phantom of the Opera, the performers range from the winsome (Lorna Want as the lovestruck Luisa) to the underpowered (David Burt as one of the young lovebirds' two fathers) to wildly hammy and OTT - that last, the redoubtable Edward Petherbridge, here wasted in the part of an ageing, fruity thesp given over to mangling passages of Shakespeare. Small wonder a character described only as The Mute (Carl Au) looks on in disbelief.

Clive Rowe (pictured right, with David Burt) lends a stentorian vigour to the part of the other father; between them the two men erect a wall so as to keep apart the very lovebirds that then learn more about life than they - or we - could have wished for come the second act. Playing El Gallo, our guide into the piece and the character that gets the show's defining number, "Try To Remember", Hadley Fraser vacillates between crisp, even plummy oratory and some sort of strange approximation of Zorro - perhaps forgetting that the masked man's own musical departed the West End some while ago. "Round and Round" is the number that most directly posits El Gallo as a Phantom of sorts to the enquiring Luisa's would-be Christine, with the difference that the lair underlying the Paris Opera turns out here to be a tree - oops, make that "tree", given the artifice in which The Fantasticks traffics so avidly. (The moon, we're informed, is "plastic, phony, hollow".)

That's the paradox of The Fantasticks, which on the one hand celebrates theatrical fakery while wanting on the other to gladden our hearts with a genuinely sweet score, many numbers from which are well known to American playgoers of a certain generation, myself absolutely among them. (I've always had a soft spot for "Plant a Radish", which offers a paean to the vegetable kingdom that you don't find in, say, Dirty Dancing.)

But I'm afraid you can't force charm any more than you can make much that is meaningful out of this musical's parable of life. ("The world happened to me," concludes Luke Brady's Matt, Luisa's intended, by way of explaining the mess that takes him over late in the show.) At the end, The Mute appears yet again, continuing to deluge all and sundry with stardust and confetti and heaven knows what else. Isn't it hard to sing when you've got stuff swirling around you? Not that The Mute would know. As might be guessed from his name, the chap keeps his mouth shut throughout.

• The Fantasticks is at the Duchess Theatre until 4 September
• Find little-known film version of The Fantasticks on Amazon