Hard to dislike this varied mix

Last year, Jazz Garters took over from the long running Old Time Music Hall. This year's show puts the emphasis again on musicals and variety and the results make an agreeable if rambling two hours. It's not quite up to the "sizzling" suggested by the fiery dancer Rep has on the advertising, but there are a number of moments that make it difficult to dislike.

Jim McMullen's lively onstage band holds together a show that rangers from rollerskating from Starlight Express to Bronwyn Sullivan's beautifully assured handling of the ironies of I Hate Musicals to the Monty Python sketch about living in cardboard boxes in the middle of the road.

Ian Croker and Dick Goldberg worthily revive Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in the priceless piece about a one-legged man who wants to audition for the role of Tarzan. Goldberg and Charles Olivery exhort us all to Brush Up Shakespare. And Graham Robertson, bandaged up and lugubrious as ever, treats us to a version of the Gerard Hoffnung story of the bricklayer, the barrel of bricks and the behaviour of pulleys.

Christine Forbes excels in a fiendishly difficult song called The Girl in 14G. This is about the problems caused to a shy tenant by singing neighbours in a New York apartment and consequently requires a range from opera to jazz, something Forbes manages with ease.

There are glamorous dancers who can also sing and jugglers who don't drop stuff and magician Andy Burton, who not only has a terrific line in tricks but also has a very assured line of friendly patter.
Peter Karmel comes close to stealing the show with an act involving long and suggestive pink balloons and a face that is full of distressed innocence.

It's not all revivals of ancient material, although the absent-minded nun (Judy Wilkinson) whistling along to Albert Ketelbey's In a Monastery Garden harks back to various earlier ages of performance. '80s band Oasis is sent up very capably and there is a barbershop quartet who find it difficult to avoid sliding off uncontrollably into a much more modern repertoire.

The set is clever, especially the revolve, and it does not really matter that it is recycled from last year's. The whole show is really all a bit of a mixture that never quite coheres thematically but it does entertain as it goes and there's some real talent on the stage.