Tell Me on a Sunday ★★★
Hayes Theatre
April 18 until May 12

If you have a long memory for musical theatre, you might know Tell Me on a Sunday.

Nowadays it’s hard to imagine Andrew Lloyd Webber (The Phantom of the Opera, Cats) making something as small as this one-woman show about searching for love from 1979, but then, it was collaborator’s Tim Rice’s idea initially – though an infidelity scandal saw Rice out and Don Black in as lyricist.

Locally, it might be best remembered as part of Song and Dance, the Cameron Mackintosh production that paired it with a ballet set to Lloyd Webber’s Variations, playing Australia in 1983.

Forty years later, The Girl (of course the unnamed woman in a show by two men from the 1970s is called simply ‘The Girl’) has returned in a new production, directed by Blazey Best.

Played by Erin Clare, The Girl is alone on a small platform stage. She’s surrounded by the band who are dressed (delightfully) in period costume. This helps establish time and place on the minimalist set, thankfully – a show without much dialogue relies on its design for context clues – and gives us a framework through which to consider the work.

And this is a work that really does make the most sense in its own time. The Girl has only a few lines that aren’t about, or informed by, a man – the show is about her, but we know so little about who she really is on her own.

Clare is charming and elegant, at her most sincerely poignant in the title number, but in a one-woman show without dialogue, we need a performer that will confide in the audience; as a co-conspirator with us, The Girl would have much more dimensionality and personality.