By Richard Vines

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- It's great to see so many actors finding work in a London show. It's just a shame it's in ``Daddy Cool,'' which opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre last night.

A musical built around the songs of Boney M was always going to have a fundamental flaw: the songs of Boney M. This pop group was mediocre in its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the 21st century is too early to attempt a revival.

Sadly, that is not the only problem with ``Daddy Cool,'' which is also lumbered with tired dialogue and a third-hand plot (``Romeo and Juliet'' via ``West Side Story'') distinguished only by the addition of contemporary cliches of urban life such as gun crime.

Sunny (Dwayne Wint), a black musician, falls in love with Rose (Camilla Beeput), the sister of his rival Benny (Davie Fairbanks). The siblings' mother Ma Baker (Michelle Collins) is a hard-nosed club owner with a grudge against Sunny's mum (Melanie La Barrie.)

Sunny and Benny face off in a rap contest that ends with a humiliated Benny shooting one of Sunny's crew. Ma Baker plants the gun on Sunny who briefly goes to jail before Benny is grassed up by one of his gang. The two mothers are reconciled and the young lovers celebrate at the carnival that winds up the show.

Reluctant Audience

All this takes almost three hours, though some of that was due to the audience's understandable reluctance to return to its seats after the interval. The show, directed by Andy Goldberg, sags in several places and would need to be cut by at least 30 minutes to have any kind of shape.

That would still leave the Boney M songs. Does anyone really wants to spend an evening listening to such gems as ``Rasputin''? As if recognizing this, the producers throw in other artists' numbers and I found my mood brightening when Milli Vanilli's ``Girl You Know It's True'' popped up. That is not a good sign.

Sean Cheesman's choreography is undistinguished, partly because it's hard to do much with disco songs in a present-day setting. (And a full-on disco flashback doesn't even take off.) So we end up with a bit of dancehall here, some street there, the occasional break dance, and crotch-grabbing when the rap cranks up.

The evening isn't without its good bits. Job Angus, 8, as the young Sunny, looks like a major talent. And La Barrie stopped the show with a belting performance of ``I Can't Stand the Rain.'' There's rapping from Harvey, formerly of the garage and grime band So Solid Crew. And I'm sure some punters will happily pay to see the pop star Javine perform as a pole dancer in a nightclub scene.

Carnival Crowd

The show does comes alive in the carnival scene, with bold and colorful designs by Jon Morrell and Federica Lucchesi, the stage crowded with the cast while other dancers run around the auditorium.

I haven't been so scared I'd be dragged into audience participation since a go-go boy in leather shorts jumped off the stage and onto my foot during the Pet Shop Boys musical ``Closer to Heaven.''

Two of the original singers from Boney M came on stage and joined in the finale, when the entire audience was on its feet. There were plenty of friends of the cast to lend support last night and it would be a lot less fun in a thinly populated auditorium.

``Daddy Cool'' is at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London. For tickets, tel. (44) (20) 7379-5399 and pay a 2 pounds ($3.80) a ticket booking fee. For (free) information, go to www.daddycoolthemusical.com/ .

(Richard Vines is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Richard Vines in London at rvines@Bloomberg.net .