I am usually resistant to the type of show which is essentially a ten-minute sketch stretched out for two hours. But I will make an exception for this take on those mindless Hollywood musicals of the thirties in which a girl arrives from Hicksville to get a job on Broadway and within one day has become a star and a wife.

This was the small-scale musical which started life in a cafe, was expanded into a New York theatre success and made a star of the then 17-year-old Bernadette Peters. It was not, I recall, quite such a hit when it arrived in the West End. The reason for the success of this limited-run revival is that it is done with real affection for the period, a sweetly innocent time when Depression era audiences really wanted to believe in fairy tales. It is funny but it is also quite moving in its wide-eyed depiction of a group of young people, two chorines and two sailors, who decide, when the theatre in which the imaginary show Dames at Sea is to be staged is demolished in mid-rehearsal, to "put it on right here, on the deck of a battleship." The very battleship, moreover, commanded by the old flame of the troublesome leading lady who has her hooks into the ingenue's boyfriend, a brilliant songwriter despite his lower-deck status, as well as the captain.
 
Writers, George Haimsohn, Robin Miller and Jim Wise, have the exact measure of the delightfully vacuous dialogue and tunes that are reminiscent of every type of the early thirties period. And the director, John Gardyne, pulls some sparkling performances out of his company - Kim Criswell as the imperious but lowly-born star, Peter Duncan doubling as troubled producer and stiff-necked captain, Sara Crowe as the dumb dancer with the sharp mind, Jason Gardiner and Jon Peterson as the tap-dancing tars and Joanne Farrell making her own bid for fame as the delightful Ruby.