'Is Jesus in the house tonight?," asked Brother Alan. And did He have a ticket, muttered one reviewer, billeted, like most of us, in a corridor of the Olympia. Maybe that was part of God's plan - how appropriate is it to review a church service? The Harlem Gospel Choir didn't want favourable sound-bytes from the reviewers, anyway - they wanted to gather them in. They needed crooks. My partner, taken into the fold by one of the Sisters and heading for the stage to the strains of When the Saints . . broke free and legged it over the seats towards Maureen's Bar. In truth, the relationship between Church and theatre in the choir's performance is uneasy. The singers wear striking costumes, stick to a tightly choreographed play-list, and even the semi-private "Halleluljahs!" going on among the Sisters were faded out before the next number. All of this can probably be understood, from the point of view of the choir, as "ministry" - it is a formula to reach out to the unbelievers. Seeing an Irish audience being thus proselytised was hugely interesting. They entered into it, singing and dancing, but seemingly, for the vast majority, with no religious conviction. Hearing a gospel choir, it becomes obvious that this is the voice behind most popular music, a voice convinced it is sharing the Truth, except that in pop, the Truth is secular. The trademark sound is the voice of a witness against a great wash of perfectly pitched harmony, but both are so slickly produced that the soul of a great song, such as Swing Low for instance, was quite lost. The choir's performance is too much church to be good theatre - and much too much theatre to be good Church.