Go west, witches

Besides, why risk opening an untested show on Broadway - with costs sometimes double those of the West End - where a show can be gone within months? London clearly remains the safer option, not least because the imprimateur of West End success then acts as a show's best advocate for a transfer to New York.

Nonetheless, with Witches at last upon us, I can't help feeling "good show/wrong city", more or less borne out by this week's mixed critical response. If ever a putative London blockbuster seemed ripe for New York - in terms of subject matter, sentiment and score - Witches is it. As an American based in London for many years, here's my advice to this newborn musical: go west, young show.

Why? Begin with the music by relative American unknowns John Dempsey and Dana P Rowe. They fared distinctly poorly with the London press in their previous outing, a Mackintosh-backed run of The Fix, directed by Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse in 1997. Paradoxically, Mackintosh has acknowledged that the dismissive response to The Fix moved him to give the songwriters another chance with Witches. "The fact is," says the producer, "a lot of the British critics don't have an ear." Nor can Londoners necessarily be expected to appreciate an appealingly eclectic score steeped in the Broadway era of Bells Are Ringing and Bye Bye Birdie of some 40 or more years ago.

While too many contemporary composers are writing in a genre that one might best describe as post-Sondheimian drear, Dempsey and Rowe pay homage to an unabashedly jazzy, brassy Broadway of yore: torch songs and anthems, wistful ballads and all-out oompah company numbers. This score's totemic figures would seem to be Frank Loesser, Jerry Herman and Cy Coleman, not the heavily orchestrated faux-operatics of the Lloyd Webber or Alain Boublil/Claude-Michel Schonberg school - the team behind Miss Saigon and Les Misérables - on whom Mackintosh made his millions.

The result, in musical terms, places Witches in opposition to the bulk of West End fare, which tends towards either ponderous Puccini-isms or Abba Euro-pop. (The exception: Maria Friedman's first-act showstopper, Words, Words, Words, which owes a delightfully self-evident debt to the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan.) If such a decisively American sound deserves an American hearing, one goes on to question the suitability for the British of the musical's very attitude and tone.

Compare, for starters, some of the other heroines concurrently on offer in the West End - Blood Brothers' hapless Mrs Johnston, for instance, with her doomy fixation on Marilyn Monroe; or the fall-and-rise-and-back-again trajectory of Spend Spend Spend's Viv Nicholson, a tough little lady whom life has clearly not spared.

Against these self-evident English victims, what could seem bolder and more brash than not one American woman but three who learn to live without men and, in the process, love themselves? "I am the music," sings cellist Joanna Riding in the show's exultant final number, Look At Me, with sculptress Lucie Arnaz adding for good measure: "I am a major work of art." Frustrated journalist Maria Friedman, meanwhile, discovers that her much-needed words were "inside me all along".

Before long, the trio have launched into exactly the kind of roof-raising hymn to selfhood on which thrives the Broadway musical as an extension of the American psyche. (The deliciously cynical Chicago sends up this very notion in a lyric like: "I am my own best friend.") "How corny," remarked an English friend, reacting to sentiments that across the Atlantic have assumed the status of gospel. And therein lies the difference in what may well be Witches' appeal. If I were Cameron Mackintosh, I'd shift my expectations for this show westward, where an entire populace exists ready to join the sisterhood.