Breakfast At Tiffany's, Leeds Grand Theatre, today at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 848 2700 or leedsgrandtheatre.com THE poster says it all. Pop star Pixie Lott's name is in capital letters, more prominent than the show's title, and she looks a teasing approximation of Audrey Hepburn in Blake Edwards's 1961 American romantic comedy. Little black dress, dark glasses, pearls.

As a marketing tool, it has worked, but the reality is that "giving Truman Capote's classic tale of Holly Golightly a new lease of life as a stage play with music in a sparkling, sophisticated production" is a whole heap harder than merely polishing some old jewellery.

This is the Curve Theatre production from the Leicester theatre's new artistic director, North Yorkshireman Nikolai Foster, whose past productions at the West Yorkshire Playhouse have often been a thing of beauty and wonder.

Here he brings his trademark facility for stylish storytelling and visual panache, but Richard Greenburg's adaptation is heavy like sourdough bread, too long too in both halves and has a chill at its core, where the Hollywood movie knew it needed romance and a cat reunion to be the final memory.

The play is truer to the book's tone, often as hard as a kidney stone, and that is the braver path to take but it only affirms that sometimes the odds are stacked too much against you when you seek the original truth of a story set in 1941 and told by a sour narrator, Matt Barber's Fred, some 15 years later.

Capote famously wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly Golightly, and Foster goes light too with the blond-haired Pixie Lott, although the Pixie voice is more a proxy for Hepburn's enunciation. There is unfortunately a need for greater range both in vocal and physical expression, except when she sings, and she could do with more charm too. Her Holly does not strike you as "this exquisite extrovert who every woman wants to be, and every man wants to be with".

Matthew Wright's designs evoke 1940s' New York but Holly's "fantastical existence" does not transcend the setting, and this Breakfast At Tiffany's lacks lustre and bypasses the heart.

Breakfast At Tiffany's, Leeds Grand Theatre, today at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 848 2700 or leedsgrandtheatre.com