Byline: IRVING WARDLE

As Alan Jay Lerner pointed out on this page yesterday, the ten Academy Awards he and Frederick Loewe won with the film of Gigi were no guarantee of its subsequent stage success. Mr Lerner puts this down to the big-band treatment it got on Broadway. But a more modest approach was attempted at the Leicester Haymarket five years ago; and that, too, failed to follow the other Haymarket musicals up to town.

Now it appears again: ostentatiously shorn of scenic spectacle, chorus, and production numbers, and production numbers, and accompanied by a small band that would sound at home as a soothing background to conversation in a prewar Palm Court. No doubt this is deliberate. Numbers like 'I Remember It Well' and 'The Night They Invented Champagne' have come to sound like Palm Court favourites; and Mr Lerner frankly views the piece as an exercise in nostalgia.

We are being invited to...