Helen Hawkins

It has nothing to do with the Welsh band Stereophonics, though everything to do with typical rock band behaviour. Playwright David Adjmi hasn’t named the one we are watching, a band recording an album in 1976 that will make them megastars, as Rumours did for Fleetwood Mac, a band notoriously riven with breakdowns and divorces. But the internecine spats Adjmi’s group members engage in as the album’s gestation drags on, and six months become a year, are standard-issue for most gods of rock.

The one theme that does still resonate is the one Alexandra adopts as she plots her escape to a future with music and European culture in it: not to be the kind of person who stands around and watches as injustices are inflicted. But Turner’s production doesn’t really present us with a play focusing on American racism or the iniquities of the South. These issues are in the text but not at this staging’s core. Ditto feminism. What we are left with is a patchwork: a plot about family finances and double-crosses yoked to a melodrama – emphasised by the ominous rumbling sounds that accompany the climax. As a tragedy of failed dreams, though, it doesn't engage.

The little Menier has somehow shoehorned this spectacular into its limited playing space, tricked out here as a big Broadway venue with red velvet curtains, swirling follow-spots and posters outside. Max’s office is created inside it with just a door with his name on it, a giant safe that doubles as all manner of furniture and, of course, a casting couch. At the rear are handy jungle-gym bars the cast can hang from and even dance on.

What’s especially gratifying is to see the range of the performers, from Sondheim veterans Joanna Riding and Janie Dee, the latter a returnee from the 2002 gala, to newer Sondheim singers such as the rich-voiced Christine Allado and Bradley Jaden, a deliciously seductive Wolf to Peters' Red Riding Hood (pictured right). We also get to see Jeremy Secomb, the great Sweeney Todd from the Tooting pie-shop production, which Sondheim visited (and got spattered with stage blood), and the dynamic Jason Pennycooke, a seasoned musicals man who was a fine Lafayette in Hamilton.