“London’s most wanted musical” runs the tagline to this West End premiere of a Broadway flop (it ran for 36 performances in 2011), nodding not so much to the truth but to the minor-outlaw status this 2009 mediocrity with lyrics by Don Black has somehow seemingly acquired.

So enthusiastic was the reception earlier this year to Nick Winston’s semi staged version that ran for two nights at Drury Lane that this fully staged iteration apparently owes its existence to audience demand. One could almost argue it’s possessed of the same odds-defying spirit as Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the two live-fast-die-young gunslingers whose murderous bank-robbing spree across a Depression-era Midwest won them at the time a rapturous cult following.

But the odd thing about Bonnie and Clyde the musical, which features a book by Ivan Menchell and score by Frank Wildhorn, is how very conventional and unexciting it is. The book notably departs from Arthur Penn’s unsettlingly ambiguous 1967 classic film, mainly by adding a back story featuring the pair’s younger selves in thrall to their respective versions of the American dream: she yearns to be a movie star; he idolises Jesse James.

While you can understand the desire trying to head off as many comparisons with the movie as possible, this is a mistake: where Penn’s creation gained much of its strange provocative power by refusing to explain, here the hammering home of simplistic motivations coupled with the extra excuse of poverty makes this curious pair all the less interesting.

Wildhorn’s thumpingly mismash score indulges most of the clichés you might expect – bluegrass, country and gospel, invariably through the filter of generic power ballads – while Winston can’t do much to disguise the fact almost every scene is constructed along the same tension-sapping template: bit of dialogue, big number, on to the next. With lyrics including “Dyin’ ain’t so bad…/only when one’s left behind/does it get sad”, it’s not Black’s finest hour, either.

Yet this production undeniably boasts some arresting performances. Coincidentally, the two leads appeared together in the recent West End revival of Heathers (itself a teen-movie riff on the Bonnie and Clyde myth), and they radiate a similar chemistry here.

“London’s most wanted musical” runs the tagline to this West End premiere of a Broadway flop (it ran for 36 performances in 2011), nodding not so much to the truth but to the minor-outlaw status this 2009 mediocrity with lyrics by Don Black has somehow seemingly acquired.

So enthusiastic was the reception earlier this year to Nick Winston’s semi staged version that ran for two nights at Drury Lane that this fully staged iteration apparently owes its existence to audience demand. One could almost argue it’s possessed of the same odds-defying spirit as Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the two live-fast-die-young gunslingers whose murderous bank-robbing spree across a Depression-era Midwest won them at the time a rapturous cult following.

But the odd thing about Bonnie and Clyde the musical, which features a book by Ivan Menchell and score by Frank Wildhorn, is how very conventional and unexciting it is. The book notably departs from Arthur Penn’s unsettlingly ambiguous 1967 classic film, mainly by adding a back story featuring the pair’s younger selves in thrall to their respective versions of the American dream: she yearns to be a movie star; he idolises Jesse James.

While you can understand the desire trying to head off as many comparisons with the movie as possible, this is a mistake: where Penn’s creation gained much of its strange provocative power by refusing to explain, here the hammering home of simplistic motivations coupled with the extra excuse of poverty makes this curious pair all the less interesting.

Wildhorn’s thumpingly mismash score indulges most of the clichés you might expect – bluegrass, country and gospel, invariably through the filter of generic power ballads – while Winston can’t do much to disguise the fact almost every scene is constructed along the same tension-sapping template: bit of dialogue, big number, on to the next. With lyrics including “Dyin’ ain’t so bad…/only when one’s left behind/does it get sad”, it’s not Black’s finest hour, either.

Yet this production undeniably boasts some arresting performances. Coincidentally, the two leads appeared together in the recent West End revival of Heathers (itself a teen-movie riff on the Bonnie and Clyde myth), and they radiate a similar chemistry here.