With the eighth TV series of Bad Girls now looming, anyone longing to know what happened in the first two will find some answers here. With added music. Can timorous Rachel, first-time offender and weeping for her fostered babe, resist the sexually voracious Officer Jim Fenner (Hal Fowler)? Will the prison bully Shell cackle with wicked joy as she throws Rachel’s photo of her babe down the toilet? Can true love bloom between the elegant and reformist Wing Governor Helen and the elegant lifer Nikki, sentenced for killing the policeman who tried to rape her girlfriend?

These are not even half the storyettes that Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus have retold from their immensely successful series. (They wrote Footballers’ Wives too.) The snippety structure is the style of all TV drama set within a closed community.

First a snatch of Helen’s worries — “Not every Juliet wants a Romeo” — next the latest dastardly scheme in Jim’s campaign to replace her, before we see Shell (or Nikki, was it?) starting the prison riot.

The unsubtle and implausibly escalating events are easy to mock but the truth is that their musical treatment here, in Maggie Norris’s high-definition production, is for the most part enjoyably jolly and even touching. Much of what happens is hopelessly incredible, making it sometimes difficult to distinguish fantasy from what, wanting a better phrase, we must call real life. When Fowler’s Jim and Rachel Izen as his trusting partner, Sylvia “Bodybag” Hollamby, seize golf clubs to use as canes for their excellent pastiche of We’re a Couple of Swells, we can guess we are into dreamland; likewise when a staircase slides into position and the prisoners, dolled up in finery, come high-stepping down the glittering steps. But when, alone in her cell, a prisoner complains musically of her lot and the dry ice rolls around her feet it becomes hard to know where we are.

Kath Gotts’s music for her own neat and sexy lyrics hovers on the edge of being memorable — not something one often feels like saying of the modern musical. Lynne Page’s riproaring choreography is concerned to express the vivacity rather than the despair, because this is a show where, as the saying goes, cheerfulness keeps breaking through. Specially notable in a cast with no duff performances are Fowler as the evil rapist, Ellen O’Grady’s disdainful Yvonne and Laura Rogers and Hannah Waddingham as the two “Juliets” who at last (did you doubt it?) can declare their love.

Box office: 0113-213 7700. Until July 1