CLEARLY, Patrick Meegan - the author, composer and director of this new Irish musical has a way with music. But for the show to work effectively on stage he was, on last night's evidence, in desperate need of both a director and a librettist.

The writing of the words between the songs, a poor pastiche of Raymond Chandler, was of a quality that made ordinary banality seem wittily profound. And the direction was gauche and clumsy.

There are two stories. One deals with Mallory inheriting a Dublin pub or night club of sorts from his uncle, but the place is in irretrievable debt and Mallory and some acquaintances decide to turn it into a centre in which to base some nostalgic characters who will deliver kissing telegrams.

The other is vested in Mallory's fantasy as a would be writer in which he becomes a private eye engaged by Marilyn Monroe to track down her lost son, James Dean.

In the first tale, Mallory is hounded by two heavy handed VAT inspectors. In the second he is hounded by two bullying cops. Neither tale is fully worked out and the merging of the fantasy with the "real" life is theatrically very unsatisfactory.

Jonathan Ryan's Mallory is played almost anonymously in the Dublin mode and as a toned down Bogart in the Hollywood fantasy. Tara Flynn's Annie (Dublin) and Marilyn (Hollywood) never really get established as either one or the other, and the Marilyn interpretation is both physically and vocally wide of the mark.

Hilda Fay's Irma (Dublin) is pert enough, but her Judy Garland bears no resemblance to the original. Jimmie O'Byrne makes a comic enough Frankie (Dublin) but fails to resemble James Dean in the fantasy and his Buck Van Quick, the American entrepreneur in Dublin is the grossest caricature. Michael Bates's Dublin Terry is innocuous enough while his Hollywood Elvis sometimes sounds like the King but seldom moves quite like him.

Andy O'Callaghan's music is brisk and well orchestrated from largely electronic sources but the sound balance means the voices are too often drowned out by it.