Review: GALA The Styne Way London Palladium

I want Barry J Mishon's address book. Nestling among the pages are numbers for Chita Rivera, Bea Arthur, Rita Moreno, Tommy Tune and a host of other Broadway greats and he'd persuaded them all to fly in for a gala performance of the songs of Jule Styne at the London Palladium in aid of the Cancer Research Campaign. The only people missing were the Dagenham Girl Pipers, probably because in over 1,400 songs, Styne neglected to write anything with their particular orchestrations in mind.

Against a black cloth bedecked with twinkling stars, they all came out in their spangliest party frocks and shove-your-fingers-in-the-wall-socket hairdos, singing in memory of the man who wrote the scores for 40 films before heading East for New York to provide the music for the last great gasp of the Broadway musical. Without his knockout score for Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand might have remained a nightclub singer, Carol Channing might never have found her niche in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Ethel Merman and Angela Lansbury would never have given their greatest performances as the terrifying stage mother in Gypsy.

This staggeringly prolific composer of almost stupefying melodic gifts was, by necessity, promiscuous when it came to lyricists but the evening showed off some of his finest collaborations. He always wrote at a desk rather than a piano and had hits coming out of his fingertips - in one week during the Second World War, six numbers in the top 10 were his - but when writing shows, he insisted that he worked exclusively from character and dramatic situation. It's not only Stephen Sondheim's punchy lyrics for Gypsy that do the storytelling, Styne's zinger of an overture, with its scurrying woodwind, screeching trumpets and flat out percussion pulsates with energy, anticipation and the bump 'n' grind of the stripper that Gypsy Rose Lee was to become.

Anyone coming cold to the show is likely to have been stunned by Styne's range, if not all of the renditions. Fiona Fullerton, on day release from the pages of Hello! magazine, teetered her way through "Make Someone Happy". Similarly, if you went in not knowing that "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry", with its constantly unexpected intervals and the downward curl of the melody, was a melancholic masterpiece, you wouldn't be any the wiser by the time you left. The biggest surprise of a night ricocheting between the choice and the cheesy was a startling "I'm the Greatest Star" from Anita Harris. Fanny Brice-style Jewish shtick it wasn't: a grab 'em and slay 'em audition it was. Predictably, it was Chita Rivera who really delivered. "Ya' either got it, or ya' ain't / And boys, I got it." Never a truer word spoken. That, and the actress who quietly walked on at the end and spoke Comden and Green's heartbreaker of a lyric "The Party's Over". The actress? Helen Mirren. Now that's class.