Carnival Messiah, West Yorkshire Playhouse, London

Commendable as it is of West Yorkshire to mount an integrated West Indian-style carnival, I'm afraid this production is an argument for a colour bar. While the black performers are full of beans, as well as the holy spirit, the white ones, flabby and slack, look as if they're wondering what to microwave for supper. But that's not the show's only problem. Thematically and emotionally, too, it suffers from a lack of restraint and focus. Recently The Mysteries showed us that, with the barest of means, a troupe could tell Bible stories in song and dance and make the audience practically levitate with joy. Here one is more likely to feel weighed down by three hours of milling and happy clapping.

As co-author, with Mark Tillotson, of the book, Geraldine Connor may not have written the comedy (Joseph to Mary, at the inn: "I always told you we had a stable relationship") or the resonantly spiritual description of Judas ("a low-life scumbag"). Nor did she contrive the uninspiring choreography or the hundreds of costumes, the commitment to universality creating an effect less cosmic than chaotic.

But Connor, as "artistic director" as well as composer, arranger and lyricist, is responsible for this mediocre muddle. The first ensemble number throws everything at us – girls in ruffled dresses; blue devils with pitchforks; men in yellow cancan dresses that can't contain their huge false bosoms. What follows simply repeats those effects, as the individual numbers keep banging out the same rhythms over and over.

The tone of the piece is more that of a professional party hostess than one of wonder and ecstasy. It changes from boring to risible when a white girl, on discovering the empty tomb, says: "They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have put him," like a traveller puzzled about the whereabouts of her luggage. The one genuinely happy moment of this Messiah was a rendition of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" by a steel band, at once charming and majestic.

Carnival Messiah disregards gender as well as racial stereotypes to a degree that is at best questionable, such as making one of the thieves crucified on either side of Jesus a female in a flesh-coloured bikini. But there's no question about the one limit this show places on its inclusiveness. Jesus, we're told, fears "betrayal by the Jews," and at one point a man in the black hat and coat and long forelocks of Hasidic Jewry is shown dancing in a foolish, jerky fashion until a large black woman angrily shoves him away – a physical rebuke meted out to no one else, not even the Devil or Judas. Connor is described as a consultant on "carnival-related issues at the very highest level": this suggests she ought to go back to basics.

To 27 July (0113 2137700)