Burlesque, Savoy Theatre review - exhaustingly vapid

"It all starts with a snap," or so we're told early in the decidedly un-snappy Burlesque, which spends three hours borrowing shamelessly and tediously from far-superior sources to arrive at an artistic dead end.

Preceded by acres of press heralding the results as a train crash, this summer production at the Savoy (a place-holder for Paddington, due in the autumn) may please those astonished that Nate Bertone's set can make it through the evening without toppling over. But the overall effect of this adaptation of the 2010 film of the same name is wearying in the extreme and indicative of the sea change – irreversible, I have a feeling – of a bygone musical era made up of genuine mavericks and the one we inhabit now that exists merely to crib, pastiche, reassemble. The curse of getting old as a playgoer is that one knows both what was – and what could have been. 

The creatives behind Burlesque give every evidence of knowing what went before, since they borrow freely and unashamedly – from Bob Fosse most overtly and explicitly: he even gets a name check. But after you've ticked off the nods in the direction of Cabaret, Chicago, and Sweet Charity, the show's longueurs point you in the direction of A Chorus Line, Gypsy, 42nd Street, The Devil Wears Prada, Legally Blonde – these last two titles get their own name checks – and even, wait for it, Side Show. (The dancers on view in the venue where the show is set include "twins" quaintly called Spring and Summer.) 

These acknowledgments are tethered to a bizarrely structured origin story decked out with 30 or so songs, which in turn cull from the Cher-Christina Aguilera film – Diane Warren's "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me," amongst them – alongside scads of new numbers from, most prominently, the pen of Todrick Hall. The YouTube phenomenon whose performing credits include stints in Chicago doubles as co-star and director-choreographer. Not since Sean Baker at this year's Oscars has a polyhyphenate been so busy, not least because Hall kept getting drafted to take over from one or another of the team who exited on the way to the West End – Nick Winston, director, among them. 

The offstage scenario surrounding Burlesque sounds more eye-opening than what unfolds onstage, which tiresomely hues to the tried-and-true. After Hall gives us his "Willkommen"-adjacent greeting, the hardworking newcomer Jess Folley (herself one of five credited songwriters) shows up in Aguilera's screen role as Ali. This wide-eyed newcomer to big city ways departs her native Iowa not for LA, as in the film, but for New York only to find herself in the embrace of Theresa Richardson, aka Tess (Broadway veteran Orfeh, in the Cher role), the club owner whose bark turns out to be worse than her bite. Tess reviles Ali at first, only to take her under her wing in rather more ways than one (to say more would be to reveal a spoiler). 

Along the way, Ali falls into the embrace of the partnered (but not for long) Jackson (Paul Arthur French), whose bare-chested appearance on opening night elicited halfhearted wolf whistles from the crowd. His torso in any case is merely preparatory to the Magic Mike antics of a feverish ensemble. This kind of thing has become de rigueur on the West End at least since Cinderella, even if Fabian Aloise in Evita seems alone these days in sculpting dancers into anything resembling a kinetically engaging, sensual unit. 

Suffice it to say that Ali gets an erotic makeover to go with a new job that finds her assuming fan-dancing pride of place as befits a vocal powerhouse whom we see encouraged at the start not to hold back on her gift. (Hall, clearly not one to miss an opportunity, also plays the mentoring, churchbound Miss Loretta who sets Ali on her way.) The club setting shows the dancers in various states of décolletage – Hall's original ditties include one called, yes, "What are Clothes?" – and puts right in an instant any resident transphobia. The lissome Trey (Jake Dupree), a real-life burlesque performer, is soon refashioned as Chardonnay, which could well lead to an uptick in bar sales of that very drink. (At the interval, by the way, my guest and I were re-seated on the other side of the stalls so that Ms Aguilera and co. could have our original seats: a first in my experience though actually the second-act view was better, especially of a side box where some of the action takes place.) 

If the show were shorter and camper – more, say, in the Titanique vein – its rabid self-indulgence might grate less. As it is, you yearn for the likes of an actual Bob Fosse to shape and trim and to question the choices on view far more trenchantly than author Steven Antin, who wrote and directed the film, has let happen here. George Maguire, the gifted Olivier winner from Sunny Afternoon back in the day, gets a preposterously overextended number that exists seemingly to confirm the cliché of the Brit as resident sleaze. Orfeh, meanwhile, is joined in the sass sweepstakes by Asha Parker-Wallace as the club spitfire, Nikki – a name itself used in Sweet Charity, albeit spelled differently. 

Orfeh, for her part, gives exactly the performance you might expect and looks great in her hip-hugging outfits, though one wonders if her resemblance to a certain theatre uber-producer at large just now is merely coincidental. Folley deserves credit for carrying much of the show on her rather charmless shoulders, and should give Hall a smack for the passing reference in which he lays claim to that very achievement himself. A brief glance at Coldplay-prompted adultery makes one wonder if the production will spend each day monitoring the news for ways to refresh nightly a scenario that at heart is irredeemably stale. I wish Burlesque well even if I do have to ask, rather anxiously, what it means for the musical theatre's future.

As pressing questions go, that one is rather more crucial, in my view anyway, than "where are clothes"?

• Burlesque at the Savoy to 6 Sept
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk