SHOUT! the Mod Musical has an enthusiasm about it that is hard to resist.
Set in the '60s, it has a score comprising songs made famous by icons of the time like Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield, written by the era's big hitters including Carole King, Burt Bacharach and Leslie Bricusse.
So packed is it with classics that everyone is going to find something to singalong to in their head, at the very least when the chorus comes round. And after the curtain call, when you get to sing out loud, you just don’t know what to do with yourself, so surrender to your inner Lulu.
This is no small matter, as in this jukebox confection, the songs dominate, their connectors a loose storyline contrived for each of the five young women through "Mod Musings" and "Groovy Gab" by Peter Charles Morris and the show's co-creator (with David Lowenstein) Philip George.
Morris's and George's sketches present the lives of the women through short monologues and correspondence with the agony aunt of SHOUT!, a popular woman's magazine. The suggestions from the advice column are deliberately funny-cringe, out of touch with the times, and have something of the 'dad joke' about them, and I wonder how much trouble will I be in if I say they would have been better written by women?
The show's five characters are colour-coded for ease of keeping track of their individual narratives, which only lightly touch on some social issues ensuring that what is on offer here is feel-good entertainment; if you want facts or social commentary look elsewhere, though for my money, the show is so firmly rooted in jollity, it could sustain a book with a little more gravitas.
Markers falling across the women's stories illustrate a period of greater social freedoms such as the availability of the pill, demands for a woman's right to choose and, oddly in some senses given the all-female context, the decriminalisation of private homosexual acts between consenting men. Amongst the milestones notable by their absence is the women machinists' strike at Dagenham over (un)equal pay.
Shout!'s cast of five (Gabrielle Cummins, Isabella Mason, Lauren Allan, Lauren Bimson and Madeleine Doody) are not equally matched in vocal strength, but together they positively fizz with energy.
Occasionally, the sound balance means lyrics are lost to the melodies played by the skilled band (Gabrielle Ball, Ella Ingram and Amy Gray), which matters more with, say, "To Sir With Love" than with "Goldfinger", but to compensate, there is always something to look at with the parade of costume changes and Jay Gardner's choreography, richly inflected with period moves like the Twist, Swim and Frug.
This is unapologetically a picture of the decade seen through oversized nostalgic lenses of the sort favoured by '60s icon Jackie Kennedy; it is flimsy but it is big on fun.
After its run in Highgate, SHOUT! the Mod Musical will visit Canterbury and Windsor.