Satire, George S Kaufman observed, is what closes on Saturday night. And even if this show, revived as part of Ian Marshall Fisher's admirable lost musicals season, lasted for 72 Broadway performances in 1946, you can see why it failed to become a popular hit: the book, co-written by Kaufman and Nunnally Johnson, hammers its attack on America's divorce-mania into the ground.
It starts brightly enough with a staid South Carolina serviceman discovering that his future high society bride comes equipped with an army of stepfathers. The bride's mother has married four times and even now is planning a divorce, thus setting up a chain reaction among her ex-partners. This leads to a witty first-act closing number in which Ira Gershwin's lyrics uncannily anticipate Sondheim's The Little Things You Do Together from Company. The joys of marriage, we are told, include "growing old and fond together, sleeping through Pelléas and Mélisande together".
But George Jean Nathan in 1946 rightly argued that "the constant hitting of the single divorce note makes for ultimate torpor". Arthur Schwartz's music, while pleasant enough, boils down to a series of set-piece numbers reminding us of his origins as a writer of revues. If the show is worth reviving, it is as a reminder of the days when American musicals were book-driven, and when the country itself brimmed with economic confidence.
The piece is put across with great elan, in concert version, by the 14-strong cast. Elizabeth Counsell as the bride's serially monogamous mother, James Vaughan as her ditheringly vague first husband, and Stephen Carlile and Helen Anker as the young lovers all shine in an occasion for curio-collectors.
· Until April 27. Box office: 0844 412 4300.