A Little Night Music (The Garrick Theatre)
Stephen Sondheim's musicals are to theatre purists what the cricket test was to Norman Tebbit: they sort the luvvies from the lightweights.
They also epitomise what many people suspect (and fear) about the theatre: that it's long, self-regarding and too much like hard work.
So it's business as usual with Trevor Nunn's purring new production of Sondheim's 1973 period romp, which has transferred from the Menier Chocolate Factory into the West End.
The most difficult thing about Sondheim, though, is his music. He always resists the easy pleasure of a ready tune, preferring instead to roam freely around the scales in search of something flatter. And everyday dialogue in the lyrics can be toe-curlingly banal.
He is trapped in a marriage to a giddy child bride - who is secretly adored by the lawyer's over-earnest student son. Are you keeping up at the back?
Aside from its catty comedy, which owes much to Oscar Wilde, it is saturated in nostalgia and flatters its fans with knowing sophistication.
The story is an all-too-clever homage to Ibsen and Chekhov, set in a lightly comic fantasy world at the end of the 19th century.
It turns on the tale of a sexually charismatic actress courted by a thoroughly respectable but sexually frustrated lawyer.
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