Just three months after he set the town alight with his Judy Garland show at the Palladium, Rufus Wainwright is back for a run at the Old Vic. This time the brightest star in the Wainwright dynasty is here to showcase numbers from his new album, Release the Stars, which entered the chart at No 2, making it by far the most successful landmark yet in a career which has been nothing if not glittering.

Striding on in a striped black-and-white suit and shirt that made him look like a walking Everton mint, Wainwright began on Monday with the title track of Release the Stars, a showband epic announcing the death of “old Hollywood” no less. While the three horn players wrestled with an arrangement designed for a much larger brass section, and some of the other four musicians sketched in a slender approximation of the massed backing vocals on the original, only Wainwright was in a position to muster a performance that did justice to the recorded version. This he did with the touch of a showman, singing his words with the slightly inebriated melisma traditionally favoured by crooners of a certain ilk, while reaching for notes beyond the grasp of most pop singers of the modern era.

His voice was thrilling, a rich, rangy tenor forever hovering on the brink of an emotional meltdown. And his musical talents were prodigious, although his habit of informing us of how extremely difficult certain of his songs were to perform was not as endearing as he thought it was.

As he switched between playing piano and guitar throughout the show, Wainwright exuded a raw, larger-than-life charisma that fell somewhere between that of a romantic idol and a tacky game-show host. There were lots of camp bits of business between numbers, and Dawn French appeared for a blink-and-you-missed it cameo.

Wainwright changed into a lederhosen ensemble for the second half of the show, then went into full drag queen mode for the encore, during which his long-suffering backing band morphed into a ragged troupe of dancers hurling themselves at his feet as he strode around in a jacket and a pair of tights miming to the Garland standard Get Happy.

If the garish window dressing sometimes got in the way of the music, it was still a performance of considerable depth. The melodic sequence of Slideshow, during which Wainwright’s voice climbed a mountain the hard way while the horns came tumbling down in the opposite direction, was one of many superb passages, and when he sang a traditional Irish air unamplified, the crowd rose in recognition of his accomplishments as a musical talent rather than a gay icon.

*Rufus Wainwright at the Old Vic (020-7928 7616) Thurs and Fri

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