HOLLYWOOD 1927, a place in frantic transit between silence and speech.

Tycoons closet themselves with foot-long cigars in counterparts of Medici courts, leaving the talented to wither in anterooms while promoting the talentless to top jobs. If those magnates venture outside, bellhops and policemen launch uninvited into song-and-dance auditions in hopes of breaking on to the big screen. It’s all mad and bad — and, as such, a fine target for Moss Hart and George Kaufman.

The play that they wrote for Broadway in 1930 was the East Coast’s mockery of West Coast arrivism and absurdity and, at times, seems more than that. After all, Hollywood today is also synonymous with mindless celeb worship. Yet for all the glee of Kaufman and Hart’s satire, there isn’t the sophistication or sardonic wit one associates with those names, and for all the exuberance of Edward Hall’s revival, last night’s opening didn’t generate the laughter one had expected.

The plot involves a trio of second-raters from vaudeville — Lloyd Hutchinson’s cheery Jerry, Adrian Scarborough’s phlegmatic George, Victoria Hamilton’s savvy May — who join what they see as a new gold rush. They’ll set up a voice school for performers who, like the squawking screen goddess in Singin’ in the Rain, can’t cope with talkies. A lucky introduction to David Suchet’s Glogauer, a Mr Big with a taste for zebra suits, gets them hired, then inexplicably fired, then fancifully rehired, thanks to the inadvertently happy blunders of Scarborough’s Candide-like George.

The running joke is that the more dimly George behaves, at one point making a movie from a script erroneously plucked from a wastepaper basket, the more successful he becomes. There’s also a running romance, involving him and Caroline Sheen as Susan, an aspiring star whose acting consists of making semaphore signals with her arms. But the best of the piece is in the detail rather than the plot. Susan’s mum runs about mistaking waiters for Gary Cooper. A dramatist, one of a “shipment of 16” imported from New York, dementedly turns his jacket into a straitjacket after waiting six months to meet Glogauer. And Glogauer’s deadly rivals, the Schlepkin brothers appear — and turn out to be 12 Groucho lookalikes with black wigs and moustaches.

“That’s the way we do things out here, no time wasted on thinking,” roars an enjoyably imperious Suchet after whimsically making George his second-in-command; but by then satire has become travesty, and over-the-top travesty at that. There’s even a monocled von Stroheim parody who yells “Gott in Himmel” when angered. But there’s no faulting the energy of Hall’s cast or the exotic excellence of Mark Thompson’s designs, including an A rt Deco hotel staircase that rises, packed with glistening roses and artichokes, from the Olivier’s well. I just wasn’t convinced that Once in a Lifetime was worth the effort.

Box office: 020-7452 3000.