It begins wonderfully. An overture surrenders to the unmistakable strains of Jesus Christ Superstar. Eight featured vocalists march onstage at the very moment that the Sing Live (UK) Chorus rises as one to bellow "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ", before Colm Wilkinson, the show voice of his generation, wrestles the song into submission. Could it get any better than this? In short, no.

The idea behind this tribute to Sir Tim Rice's lyrics is simple. Assemble 1,000 voices from the chorus plus guest vocalists and dozens of stage-school brats and give them a Rice lyric to sing. And it's all in aid of charity.

Alas, it is also in aid of Rice's enormous and enormously misplaced ego. There may have been 1,000 voices on show, but one was more on show than any other - and, preposterously, it didn't belong to Wilkinson. Nor to the heroic Broadway fixture Judy Kuhn. Embarrassingly, non-vocalist Rice handed himself four songs, including a toe-curling duet with celebrity Big Brother star Claire Sweeney on All Time High. And he introduced it like this: "They said, 'Would you like to write a Bond theme?' I said, 'Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?'" Nothing else sank to quite those Stygian depths. However, the teeth-rattlingly shrill Kelli James rendering Don't Cry for Me Argentina as part fishwife, part Su Pollard, D Michael Heath circling the stage-school children in a manner reminiscent of Saddam Hussein and his junior Gulf war hostages on Any Dream Will Do, and Alan Menken snoozing his way through A Change in Me ran it close.

The evening's worst crime, however, was to under use the massed choir's vocal tsunami. Whole songs would amble by with scarcely a whimper from them, but when they were used properly - as on the jaunty Saul Has Slain His Thousands - the effect was breathtaking.

Others escaped relatively unscathed. David Essex breezed insouciantly through Oh What a Circus and One Night in Bangkok, while Wilkinson's Anthem showed that a great singer can always transcend less-than-great material. Scary.