No more, please, we've had enough

Written by John-Michael Howson Comedy Theatre, until December 9

JOHN-Michael Howson's musical comedy about going grey disgracefully is so wrinkled, flaccid and frail, some of our better comedians can't save it.

The show follows four retirees into the "Guantanamo Palms Retirement Village". Plump, blond couple Mac (Mark Mitchell) and Joan (Jane Clifton) meet the neurotic and thin Roy (Michael Veitch) and Myra (Tracey Harvey), and they're soon singing about what you'd expect them to sing about: Viagra, adult undergarments, flagging sex lives, daytime television, grey nomadism, and so on.

The soundtrack never rises above tinny muzak (except for a live rendition of Hokey Pokey on piano, rejigged to promote prostate checks) although after the insipidity of the first two original numbers, you're almost glad that the show devolves into limp parodies of famous tunes.

Mitchell provides rare laughs, his face sloshing amusingly through a sea of minor disappointments.

His natural comic ability somehow animates parts of a script that would otherwise have proved laboured and unfunny and overlong. His musical riff on sexless marriage, sung to House of the Rising Sun, raises a chortle.

Opposite him, Jane Clifton soldiers on, making hay where she can, trenchant through the rest.

Age seems to have caught up with Veitch and Harvey though. They forget lines, kill punchlines, and are reduced, in one moment of bowel-loosening humiliation, to singing "la-la-la-la-la" during a song about flatulence.

But the primary problem is the writing: unstylish and uninspired. If this is the best John-Michael Howson can do, it's time he hung up his tackle.