Tell Me on a Sunday, St James Theatre, London, review It only runs an hour but it's a golden hour. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black's song cycle - first presented as an album and televised concert before becoming one half of the West End show Song and Dance in 1982 - is the best thing they've done together and that includes Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard and Stephen Ward. It got over-extended in later incarnations but in this St James Theatre revival, featuring its original star, Marti Webb, it defaults back to its exquisite early form. Relaying the emotional journey of an ordinary North London girl who heads to America in search of romance and a sense of meaning, it's direct, playful, intimate and heartfelt; it's the closest The Lord has come to showing a mainstream pop sensibility. Webb, for whom the piece was written and who made it her own - achieving a top three single with the stand-out hit Take That Look Off Your Face - knows the work inside out; she toured it in the Eighties and ten years ago stepped back into the role after it returned to the West End with Denise van Outen. But as she takes to the stage in front of a recording-studio's worth of musicians (Simon Lee and band), wearing patterned blouse and grey trousers, there's no air of grandeur. She looks young for her years but as she sings becomes younger still: at once remembering past states of optimism, uncertainty, vulnerability and defiance and inhabiting them for the first time. The tone is conversational - encompassing the sort of oblivious outpouring you might overhear in a New York diner and the unguarded style of a letter home too. At times she sits, confides; at others stands still, recriminatory, pleading. The Sondheimian second number Let Me Finish is built on ingenious staccato stops and starts, while the melting title-track is so filled with sadness at impending rejection it can make the most trite rhyme "Take me to / A zoo" touching. Though backdrop projections help us identify whether we're in Manhattan or Hollywood, we're continually trying to piece together a human puzzle - who the various men are, who she is. This suburban girl in a skyscraper world is a work-in-progress but the work itself is blissfully complete in its own terms. There's no need for the odds and sods musical showcase that bulks out the start of the evening - though a post-show Q&A with Webb would be more than welcome. Until Jan 12. Tickets: 0844 264 2140; stjamestheatre.co.uk; transfers to Duchess Theatre, Feb 18 to Mar 1. Tickets: 0844 482 9672; nimaxtheatres.com