Promises, Promises, Southwark Playhouse, London, review: The trouble is that the material does not exactly brim with musical possibilities

The revival of musical ‘Promises, Promises’ is based on the Oscar-winning 1960 Billy Wilder movie ‘The Apartment’, but it doesn't lend itself well to the now all-singing cast

Gabriel Vick as Chuck and Daisy Maywood as Fran in 'Promises, Promises' at Southwark Playhouse (Claire Bilyard)

This musical, premiered on Broadway in 1968, has a distinguished pedigree. Its score is by the great songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The book by Neil Simon is a stage adaptation of the The Apartment, the Oscar-winning Billy Wilder movie from 1960 starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. But watching this new production by Bronagh Lagan, it’s not hard to see why the piece is so seldom mounted (this is the first revival in London in just over 20 years).

The show centres on Chuck Baxter, a junior accountant in a New York insurance company, who tries to advance his career by letting senior executives use his bachelor apartment on W 67th Street for their extramarital assignations. Difficulties arise when the head honcho, Sheldrake, commandeers the key in order to bed Fran, the sweet canteen girl whom Chuck dotes on from afar. And our hero starts to develop a spine when he nurses Fran back to health over Christmas from the drastic consequences of Sheldrake's selfish exploitation of her.

The trouble is that the material does not exactly brim with musical possibilities (has anyone ever watched The Apartment and thought, “oh, if only the characters could now break into song?”). The movie is sardonically unillusioned about the decidedly dodgy sexual politics. The show seems to want to have its cake and eat it. On the one hand, Chuck (engagingly played by Gabriel Vick) is given lots of ingratiating asides to the audience in which he cutely signals that while some may think that what he is doing is sordid, he's basically a good guy (“I'm sick of all this trash in my apartment – and not too happy about the garbage”. On the other, we get to watch dollybird secretaries frug and provide celestial vocal backing for their bosses – a cigar-wielding and unprepossessing bunch who lubriciously wonder “Where Can You Take a Girl (that you can't take home)?”. They aren't asking for eternity, for heaven's sake. “All we need is one place/For 60 minutes or 40 minutes, more or less”. What the show needs is a scathingly satiric counterbalance from the women – a chorus that could be headed by Sheldrake's sharp-tongued secretary who knows, from bitter first-hand experience, what his romantic promises are worth.

Lagan's production is persuasively cast and well-sung, with Joe Louis Robinson's seven-strong band doing attractive justice to the angular melodies and switching time-signatures of Bacharach’s music. Daisy Maywood is lovely as Fran, projecting her heartbreak and wry humour to perfection. Following the Broadway revival of 2010, this version interpolates the Bacharach hit “A House Is Not A Home” for this character. It’s a great song, but unfortunately I fail to see what sense it makes in the particular dramatic context they have found for it here.

In fact, the show only truly flares to life twice. Alex Young is very funny as the tipsy bar pick-up, draped in an owl coat that she's only too ready to shed, whom Chuck brings home and has to dismiss sharpish on Christmas Eve. And Mr Vick and Ms Maywood take exquisite turns and then harmonise, during Fran’s recuperation, on a version of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”, that leaves you, in no doubt, as it shifts from ruefulness to joy, that the title no longer applies. A genuinely dramatic use of song. Elsewhere, too many promises unfulfilled.