Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels sets two confidence men against each other in a wealthy resort town, betting that whichever of them first extracts fifty thousand dollars from a visiting heiress keeps the territory and the other leaves for good. One is silky and operatic. The other is crude and fast. Neither is as clever as he believes.

Lawrence works the long game: a fictitious deposed prince, a borrowed villa, impeccable manners. Freddy works the short one, badly, with invented ailments and a stolen limp. Their truce collapses into the wager, the wager turns into an escalating series of impersonations, and the heiress they have settled on turns out to be considerably harder to read than either of them expected.

The book is by Jeffrey Lane, with music and lyrics by David Yazbek, adapted from the 1988 film. It opened in 2005 and has been produced widely since, particularly by companies with two strong comic leads, because the whole show hangs on the double act and on a score a good deal sharper and filthier than the plot strictly requires.

Yazbek's songs do most of the characterisation, swinging from lounge pastiche to genuine romantic writing and back inside a single number. The comedy is deliberately old-fashioned - disguises, accents, a running gag involving a riding crop - and it is played with enough conviction that the final reversal actually lands.

It is for audiences who want a farce with real songs in it, and for anyone who enjoys watching two performers spend an evening trying to upstage each other. Live, the double act is the engine, and it needs a room to play to.