Missed opportunity by star’s fan club

The Glenn Miller Story, Palace, Manchester, to Saturday

On the night of the first real mists of autumn, consider this a fog warning.

The trouble with “The Glenn Miller Story” - by which I mean the show, not the historical record of the composer and band leader - is that Glenn Miller seems to have been an awful lot like Tommy Steele.

I didn’t know, for example, that Miller was a song and dance man who liked nothing more than doing a turn for a passing orchestra or singing group; that he couldn’t really play the trombone, and miraculously, that he was in his late Seventies when he went down with his plane, not the 40 or so we always believed.

Then again he packed a lot into those years, including romancing a girl less than half his age.

“The Glenn Miller Story” (the show), though fogged with this overlay of the Tommy Steele Show — no real surprise there — is actually a pretty slick piece of song and dance entertainment from a man you wouldn’t guess was 79 next month; an entertainer with zest if not vigour; still with a full head of hair and that famous mouthful of teeth, jogging if not bounding round the stage in full song and dance mode for most of the evening.

Alongside him is a small cast of actors, led by the attractive (and young) Sarah Soetaert as Miller’s wife, Helen, and alongside them a terrific on-stage band for those favourite melodies and arrangements, a large-scale, open set and a strong cast of dancers and singers.

But what this isn’t, not really, is anything resembling the Miller story.

It’s an approximation, perhaps, of the James Stewart film, but the biography is buried under singing and dancing and an ill-conceived gimmick that allows the ageing star to play Miller because everyone on stage is a member of a Miller appreciation society, here to re-enact his life story. Hardly worth devising, really, since it is paid scant attention after the first few minutes.

Tommy Steele is presenting the show with producer Bill Kenwright because he’s an enormous fan of the composer, and there’s nothing wrong with that if you can make it work.

But I can’t help concluding Tommy doesn’t do his hero any favours with this sort of hero worship. It’s a shame he didn’t fixate on someone who at least made it to 70, and could sing and dance.