When in doubt, hire a good band. The quartet of New York-based musicians who are backing Ute Lemper in her new show, Naughty Baby, have amassed a list of prestigious credits between them, playing everything from jazz to Broadway musicals, Latin music and rock.
So they have no difficulty keeping up with Lemper's leaps between Weimar vampiness and neurotic satire, with guitarist Mark Lambert peeling off a succession of muscular solos, both acoustic and electric.
The star, meanwhile, supplies a mixture of what she does best and stuff she doesn't handle quite so well. Her adventures in the Kurt Weill catalogue are handled with typical energy and aplomb, especially a show-closing version of Alabama Song in which, for the first time during the evening, Lemper throws caution to the wind and devours the stage with her long-legged swagger.
With dominatrix-style disdain, she hijacks a wallet from a man in the front row and shoves his credit cards down her cleavage (no mean feat, considering the tightness of her mini-dress), as if the Savoy had been transformed into a squalid bordello.
In fact, this show could benefit hugely from being hosed down with sleaze and transferred to a louche cabaret. Lemper, sardonically manipulating the tension between greed, lust and voyeurism, has her style cramped by having to play down towards a seated audience.
Her lesbian routine in When the Special Girlfriend, on this occasion involving a bemused customer called Lily, cries out for some outrageous interaction (though Lily might not agree), which is rendered impossible by the fact that Lemper's victim is sitting in the middle of the fourth row.
The comedy interludes are of variable quality, especially a teeth-clenchingly inept bit about BSE and foot and mouth that requires a far more delicate comic touch, but in an environment where the audience felt free to heckle and answer back, they might have sprung to life.
Also, though Lemper has tackled a broad cross-section of material in her career, you are left wondering where most of it is, since the bulk of the show comprises pieces from the usual suspects such as Weill, Jacques Brel and Kander and Ebb.
She includes The Case Continues, written by the Divine Comedy and featured on her Punishing Kiss album, and its menacing ambience and stalking beat make it one of the evening's highlights, but why not chuck in some of the disc's other pieces by Nick Cave, Tom Waits or Philip Glass? They certainly couldn't have sounded more incongruous than "special guest" Mark Vincent's My Love, My Dear, which is pleasant enough if you're looking for a watered-down version of Seal. But no doubt Naughty Baby will evolve during its run.
• Until July 14. Box office: 020-7240 1166.
