Is there anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know the songs from Singin’  in The Rain? With its perennial drive and freshness, this is a feel good musical which has always managed to survive directorial eccentricities thus living on to tour another year.

Singin’ In The Rain is, as we all know, set in the Hollywood of the early thirties when sound arrived and certain Hollywood actors  hose voices were not up to it ended up with egg on their faces and terminated contracts.

These are the best bits of this particular revival, where to think musically is easier than thinking dramatically.

And the scenes where the star of the studio, Lina Lamont (the excellent Faye Tozer) is forced to acknowledge that she is no Ethel Barrymore, lift the current production from the frequently mundane into the totally delightful.

Ms Tozer in a Marie Antoinette wig squawking into the mike on her shoulder - thus wrecking the film in which sound has made its first entrance, is one of the high spots of the evening, and the silent film itself has been done beautifully.

Yet these are moments which do not last long enough.

Every musical worth its salt needs a lively company to support the leading actors and the young people who race on and off stage like so many shooting stars are terrific, lifting the plot and extending it into the musical numbers which hold the whole thing together.

You Stepped Out Of A Dream was originally a lavish production number in a late 1930s Ziegfield Follies extravaganza. How it got into the score of Singin’ In The Rain is a mystery, but it’s a rare song and it was a pleasure to hear it again.

The permanent set is bleak and mostly resembled the outside of a prison. Any musical on the life and untimely death of Oscar Wilde (I’m sure there’s one brewing somewhere) could certainly use it to advantage.

But this is Thirties California - sun, beaches, orange groves and light, light, light! Light everywhere, in fact but not much on this set! Occasionally the black doors part and a piece of a scene is wheeled in, mostly a circular desk  with a dozen phones, suggesting a film director’s office.

Against the set we see here, a baleful presence if ever there was one - there was little atmosphere and a number for the girls waving the phones around was a non-event.

As Kathy Selden, the little unknown who becomes a star, Amy Ellen Richardson steals the show and takes your heart from the moment she steps onto the stage until the final moments. James Leece’s performance as Don Lockwood, dancing his way beneath a stage downpour, is a work in progress and I feel that given another few weeks he may find the character he is searching for.

Stephane Anelli makes Cosmo Brown into a live-wire and Jacqueline Clarke makes her mark as the Hollywood radio chatterbox talking up the stars at the flashy film first nights.

  • Runs until April 5