Will Marti Pellow attract enough tipsy hen parties to Evita to flog all 18,000 seats?

Tim and Andy are back. Their monster hit Evita opens the fully refurbed and re-primped Dominion Theatre, which is built on the scale of an airport terminal and needs a big production to fill it. This is a beautiful version of a show that marks a decline in the Tim and Andy alliance. It hasn’t the naïve and exuberant mischief of Joseph, nor the scope and the sustained dramatic force of Jesus Christ Superstar. Earnestness, and over-reverence for their subjects, are starting to creep in. It spoils the fun to know that the Perons weren’t a pair of sweet-natured do-gooders handing out beefsteaks to the underclass but a couple of egos on stilts running a dictatorship based on fear.

The show’s two great songs are linked by a lot of connective tissue that doesn’t match them for quality, but when those big numbers arrive, one in each half, the effect is nape-tinglingly good. Sarah McNicholas, playing Peron’s former mistress, wrings every last drop of gooey emotion from ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’. Madalena Alberto, a Portuguese beauty, flings herself at ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina’ with enough passion to halt a juggernaut. She’s a songwriter too, by the way, with a newly released album called Don’t Cry for Me, which must be one of those extraordinary coincidences that happen in showbusiness.

The star attraction, Marti Pellow, spent the 1990s as lead warbler in the infelicitously named boy band Wet Wet Wet. Pellow doesn’t have to act here, just sing a bit, which he duly does. Officially, he’s playing Che Guevara, the noted terrorist, and he saunters around the stage in combat gear, observing the action but unaffected by it, like a sports commentator on his way to an IRA reunion.