With its green-faced witch, flying monkeys and oppressed helium-voiced Munchkins, L. Frank Baum’s story is a grotesque creation beneath its candy coating. As theatre, it often makes an appearance at Christmas; it makes an odd and irksomely slow experience on a summer evening.

Jude Kelly’s revival of this version, originally adapted by John Kane for the RSC in 1988, offers high-energy dance routines, hordes of singing children, echoey amplification and performances that never stray far from their counterparts in Victor Fleming's 1939 film. It is, despite its well-loved score by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg and its relentless jollity, as empty of real heart as the Tin Man believes his chest to be.

The cavernous Royal Festival Hall is not a hospitable space for theatre, and the designs here do little to make it more magical. Michael Vale’s set is a clutter of corrugated iron, pylons and metal ladders, topped with tattered 1930s advertising billboards. A video screen shows images of wide-open Kansas spaces; when the tornado strikes, those pictures are replaced by crude animations. The yellow brick road is an unimpressive coloured ring and the appearances of Julie Legrand’s Wicked Witch of the West are heralded by the kind of loud bangs and smoke you’d expect of a pretty average pantomime. Still, Legrand offers the show’s most entertaining turn, stalking about the stage with camp abandon. Siân Brooke as Dorothy doesn’t attempt to exorcise the ghost of Judy Garland; the star’s mannerisms and intonations are all here, though Brooke can’t manage her liquid-eyed vulnerability, and her singing voice is a little coarse.

Gary Wilmot is a nimble and energetic Cowardly Lion, but Hilton McRae as Scarecrow and Adam Cooper as the Tin Man struggle to project much personality beyond their costumes.

Roy Hudd mugs his way through the role of the charlatan wizard amiably enough. The real crowd-pleaser, however, is Bobby the Westie, as Dorothy’s beloved dog Toto. This appealingly shaggy, snowy mutt may not be the jet-black creature Baum’s book describes, but he displays a playfulness and spontaneity lacking elsewhere in Kelly’s production.

There is occasional fun to be had, chiefly in Legrand’s panto villainess shtick, and the reimagining, on video, of the Emerald City as a green-hued South Bank is a nice touch. But where it should be dreamlike, the staging is merely mechanical, and it’s much too mundane to enchant.

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