Ghost the Musical, Piccadilly Theatre

Death means learning to say "I love you" in the woozy world of Ghost, the 1990 film that has become a breathlessly vapid musical sure to keep hen parties happy for some while to come (especially now that Dirty Dancing has closed and Flashdance barely got going). The material is cheesy, often defiantly so, and it's here been polished to a high sheen by the director Matthew Warchus and a design team who pull out all the stops in order to snap to attention even the most ADD-afflicted in the house.

One's individual taste for such fare may depend on individual tolerance for a piece that begins with the title writ large above the audience, lest you walked into the wrong playhouse, and for sustained passages utilising sufficient amounts of celluloid that you wonder why anyone bothered to transpose the twice-Oscared film to the live theatre to begin with. This isn't the first show to confront the problem inherent in adapting a movie for live performance that then finds itself wanting - guess what? - to be a movie: there's a conundrum worth pondering in the afterlife.

But whereas some films (Hairspray, for instance) hire a fresh pair of eyes to effect the product (dis)placement that these stage ventures are essentially about, Ghost the Musical retains as writer Bruce Joel Rubin, recipient of one of the movie's pair of Academy Awards. Most everyone else is new, starting with a composer in Eurythmics' Dave Stewart, who shows that he can write generic power ballads destined to look good excerpted on YouTube; maybe Annie Lennox can cover one of them. ("Unchained Melody", not by Stewart but beloved from the movie, makes several consumer-savvy appearances, too.)

That Rubin and/or Glen Ballard's lyrics hail from the rent-a-rhyme school ("Come what may/ Nothing stops another day") favoured by everyone these days but Stephen Sondheim is meant less as a criticism than a statement of fact. The first-act ensemble number "More" can, indeed, be seen as Ghost's manic, modern-day equivalent to "Another Hundred People" from Sondheim's Company: that latter song the ultimate musical-theatre paean to New York at its most mercilessly pumped. There's a comic number, "Ball of Wax", that inexplicably brings tap dancing and a country twang to proceedings. Quite how the song survived Ghost's Manchester try-out is the biggest mystery of the night.

So far, for the most part, so efficient, even if there's something blandly pro forma near the start as our dewy-eyed young lovers, Sam (Richard Fleeshman, certainly the muscliest phantasm in memory) and Molly (Broadway's Caissie Levy, an engaging alumna of the recent revival of Hair), talk jobs and apartments and how "perfect" everything is. (Never a good thing to say out loud.) But just as Molly is pressing Sam to respond with more than simply "ditto" when confronted with the three little words cited at the top of this review, misadventure strikes, Sam is murdered, and Molly falls to pieces - until a visitation from Sam's atypically physical ghost allows this New Man to find an articulacy from beyond the grave denied him in life. Let's just hope this show doesn't result in frustrated women pushing their verbally challenged blokes in front of a bus in the hopes that he may in the process be comparably reformed.

The movie owes what subversive energy it has to the florid presence of Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost Oscar-winner number two) as Oda Mae, a fraudulent psychic who discovers she actually has the gift to restore Sam to Molly - long enough, at least, for Molly to realise better late than never just how fully she was loved. The part goes in the musical to Sharon D Clarke (pictured above right, in full diva mode), the vocal powerhouse who brings genuine sass and wit to several inevitably gospel-flecked songs: the real surprise would be a musical that doesn't so predictably pigeonhole its black participants when it comes to doling out who gets to sing in what style. Clarke's attitude-heavy live-wire, kitted out as if for her own personal revival of Hair, gets the show's single best line when she tells Molly that she finds Sam "cute - white, but cute".

The ensemble struggle to find a reason for being in what is essentially a five-character show, the remaining two being the villains of the piece. Ashley Wallen's choreography tends to lock the company into one austere pose after another, perhaps so as to better off-set the ease with which Paul Kieve's illusions facilitate Sam's transition between worlds: the walking-through-door moment offers a visual kick, which is just as well given the anti-climax in store for those awaiting the stage equivalent to Demi Moore at her potter's wheel. Clay is of less interest to the creators of this Ghost than keeping a long night optically on the front foot, which is where Jon Driscoll's restless video and projection design comes in, all but eclipsing the swoony lovers with a fevered whirligig of images that rarely lets up. (The visual swirl surrounding Sam's banking life recalls the look of the recent David Hare play, The Power of Yes.)

The show trades heavily on the belief-laden bromides that mark out the genre from The Wiz to Wicked, Lend Me a Tenor - The Musical to The Book of Mormon. The audience pre-sold on the material will doubtless enjoy the experience, even as sceptics are likely to be unmoved. My feeling on the topic: if you want a show strong on personality, wit and feeling, wait till Warchus's RSC-spawned Matilda, due on the West End in the autumn. Next to that extraordinary achievement, Ghost is notably insubstantial. Spectres tend to be like that.

• Read theartsdesk Q&A with Ghost illusionist Paul Kieve
• Book tickets for Ghost the Musical at the Piccadilly Theatre till 28 January, 2012

Watch the theatrical trailer for Ghost the Musical