"What's this about?" asked someone in the audience shortly before last night's curtain up.

A fair question, given the complete absence of narrative or plot. But music, really great, timeless music, needs no context in which to be enjoyed.

Smokey Joe's Cafe is no more and no less than a celebration of the songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the American composers who in the mid-Fifties discovered rhythm and blues in the deep south and transformed it into rock and roll for the world.

They were astonishingly prolific, churning out hits like Jailhouse Rock, Kansas City and Yakety Yak for just about anyone who could wield a mike stand. Last night, in a show which had previously taken Broadway and the West End by storm, a brilliant cast of nine boys and girls sang and danced their way through around 40 such classics.

It was the music of a time gone by; an era in which songwriters had to be productive because they were required to supply tunes for the B-sides of their records, too. Re-mixes hadn't been invented.

The show's staging was simple but immaculate, the vocals as smooth as chiffon. One song followed another as surely as if stacked on an old, well-oiled auto-changer.

Leiber and Stoller rank with Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lennon and McCartney among this century's great songwriters. Although many in last night's crowd looked to be children of a later musical generation, I doubt if any would have denied them a place in that particular hall of fame.

Smokey Joe's Cafe is in Bradford until Saturday. Tickets are as scarce as vinyl LPs in the HMV Shop - but try and get one anyway.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.