Dan Leno, one of the all-time great dames of the Victorian music hall, was committed to an insane asylum in 1903. Not content with the ample drama in his actual life, Jonathan Kydd and Andy Street's pudding-headed musical seriously oversteps the mark of poetic licence: Kydd and Street make Leno bisexual – apparently in order to show the crudity of Victorian attitudes to homosexuality and medicine – and change his cause of death – he is bumped off here by a somewhat anachronistic bungled lobotomy.
Even on its own terms, this musical is cackhanded. Comic songs are mirthless – unless sausage gags (wink wink) are your thing. And the straight numbers are risible ('Amelia/I feel for ya/If I had a rod/I'd reel for ya'). Kudos to the brave cast, but this is rotten.