Nor was she much of an actress. Her big screen debut in The Bodyguard may have done boffo business at the box office but it is an absolute clunker, clumsily plotted, devoid of charm and with an almost spooky lack of chemistry between Houston, playing a successful singer and actress, and Kevin Costner, as the dour security man with whom she falls in love.  In fact, director Thea Sharrock has done a remarkable job. Her production, spectacularly and ingeniously designed by Tim Hatley, is far more enjoyable than the movie. And there is a thrilling star performance from the Trinidad-born, American-based singer and actress Heather Headley, who, when it comes to selling a song, hitting the high notes and ornamenting a number with vocal swoops and trills, struck me as being at least as fine a singer as Houston in her heyday, if not even better.  She looks fantastic, too, with legs that go on forever and a succession of dazzling, figure-hugging costumes. Her sassy stage presence makes you engage with a character who in Houston’s performance often seemed merely spoilt and petulant.  But that is largely where the good news ends. Though Alexander Dinelaris has tweaked Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay, the show remains trite and sentimental, while Lloyd Owen proves sourly humourless and gruff as the bodyguard. Worse still, like Costner, he entirely fails to ignite the required erotic spark with his leading lady, and is even deprived of the movie’s knife-throwing routines, exactly the kind of hokum that this po-faced show so desperately needs.  There are passages when the constant use of photographic montage and film sequences comes across as a somewhat desperate attempt to turn a stage show back into the movie it originally was. But the climax, with a psychotic gunman stalking our heroine at the Oscars ceremony, is directed with a dash of real imagination, and the baddie is played with such pervy creepiness by Mark Letheren that he provokes murmurs of unease from the audience whenever he appears.  By no stretch of the imagination is The Bodyguard a great musical, and when one compares it to the current revivals of Singin’ in the Rain and Kiss Me Kate its lack of warmth and wit seems even more starkly apparent. But with all the big Whitney Houston hits superbly delivered by Headley and a cracking pit band, I suspect it is destined for a long and lucrative run.  Tickets: 0844 579 0094; thebodyguardmusical.com  Follow Telegraph Theatre on Twitter  Buy tickets to The Bodyguard. Save up to 60% on theatre tickets with Telegraph Box Office.
A musical theatre adaptation of the Whitney Houston film The Bodyguard at the   Adelphi comes close to proving you can make a silk purse out of a sow&rsquo;s ear,   writes Charles Spencer.