Boy Meets Boy, Jermyn Street Theatre, review Some of the best ideas in theatre are the simplest. Give a fresh slant on the First World War using equine puppetry. Unravel an adulterous love triangle by moving backwards in time. Or in the case of Bill Solly and Donald Ward's musical, first staged off-Broadway in 1975 and only now getting its UK premiere, provide a same-sex twist on the showbiz staple of a boy-meets-girl crowd-pleaser. What's subversively entertaining about Boy Meets Boy is that it treats the romantic entanglements of its three homosexual protagonists with a straight face. Whisking us back to a Thirties" world of decadence, high-living and society gossip, it introduces the as-yet-unrealised institution of gay marriage as a done deal - as, in fact, the most natural, unremarkable thing in the world. The opening number almost apologises for the clichés it's about to impart: "The same old story of boy meets boy, boy loses boy, but boy gets boy in the end." There's a mischievous sense of having entered some parallel, pastiche universe in which familiar historic ingredients collide with saucy details that would have been unpalatable back in the day. Roving American reporter Casey O'Brian - so lustily distracted he's no hotshot when it comes to scoops - is tasked with tracking down the lonely little English rich-boy, Guy Rose, who left eligible bachelor and preening narcissist Clarence Cutler jilted at the altar. Guy is such an unassuming, bespectacled fogey that Casey spends an age refusing to accept he is who he says he is - adding a layer of droll satire at the expense of skin-deep assumptions. Eventually they get it together, in a touchingly old-fashioned way, but not before Clarence's scheming has required Casey to track his man down to gay Paris, where he's cavorting in a burlesque joint out of wounded pride. Showing that size doesn't matter when it comes to delivering the full musical package, director Gene David Kirk and choreographer Lee Proud drape the evening's native wit and astute apercus into human nature with sparkling assurance: there's enough hoofing on the tiny Jermyn Street stage to make them feel the rumbles, and maybe even fear the competition, on Shaftesbury Avenue. Stephen Ashfield is wonderfully nonchalant as the hopeless hack, Craig Fletcher sweetly demure as shy Guy and Ben Kavanagh magnificently catty as Clarence. The rest of the 15-strong cast work their socks off to match their gleaming promise. Say it loud, say it proud, it's a hit.