Sweet Charity, Crucible Theatre, Sheffield

Dated, disingenuous and demeaning to women even in 1966, Neil Simon's book is as much a bar to enjoying Sweet Charity as a couple snogging in front of you, a man snoring behind and children eating crisps on either side. Children, though, ought not to be at this musical, adapted at Bob Fosse's suggestion from Fellini's film Nights of Cabiria. It was the first show Fosse directed as well as choreographed, and his peculiar style of trancelike contempt is here used only in a number where it really belongs. As a row of dancers-for-hire wait to be chosen, the kind of music that accompanies a striptease plays against a hellish obbligato of dead voices chanting: "Fun... laughs... good time.''

But the young Cy Coleman's splendid score and the old Dorothy Fields's crafty lyrics are steadily undermined by the limp and embarrassing story, a series of humiliations visited on its title character. One man after another picks up, uses, and dumps the gullible gamine, whom we're invited to laugh at in the manner of men recalling a dim-witted easy lay. And making the whore of the movie a New York dance-hall hostess (a job that hadn't existed for a generationand a euphemism that was old when the movies were silent) simply adds patronisation to prurience.

But Timothy Sheader's production still offers more than enough to justify a trip to this Christmas show for adults. Or not quite adults -- it's ideal for office and hen parties). Coleman's music is lush and exciting, a bold challenge to Bernstein's musicals of the city -- when you hear the castanet-clicking rhythms of "There's Got to Be Something Better Than This'' think of "America'' from West Side Story. "I Love to Cry at Weddings'' is a boisterous Irish-Jewish knees-up to which Kevin Rooney, as lead singer, does full justice.

The singers' enunciation of these wonderful lyrics is quite good by the standards of British musicals, and the dancing is great. Choreographer Karen Bruce gives us plenty of flashy tangos and high kicks without falling prey to variety-show clichés, as well as dances that are comic and characterful. As the drip who lets Charity down and the fading matinee idol who forgets her when something better beckons, John Marquez (sweet) and Mark Inscoe (suave) are better than their parts deserve. Anna-Jane Casey, as the beleaguered heroine, carries the whole show as if it weighed no more than a balloon. Her singing and dancing are expressive, her manner appealing and bright. But her comic touch seems learnt, not intuitive, and lacks a New Yorker's casual toughness and sardonic defensiveness.

Sheader has replaced the original, appalling ending with a gentle gag, but the whole book needs the Anything Goes treatment. Write a new one, somebody. Save a fine score and our blushes.

To 22 Jan (0114 249 6000)