Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture has been launched amid clouds of hype from within the city, and fog banks of scepticism from the outside world. But this cheerful, pacy, eye-poppingly flamboyant show, the high point of the opening weekend, suggested that the Scousers may yet have the last laugh.

Staged, for one night only, in the new, 10,600-seat Echo Arena on the waterfront near the Albert Dock — a cavernous venue that will be fine once they’ve finished building the roads leading to it — Liverpool the Musical was both a cinematic pageant of the city’s colourful history and a celebration of its pop music heritage. There’s plenty of the latter to celebrate, of course: Liverpool has produced more No 1 hits than any other city of comparable size — 56 at the last count. I think we must have heard at least half of them here.

And yes, sometimes the links with the kaleidoscopic film footage flitting across a giant gauze screen did seem tenuous. It was hard to make the connection, for instance, between the Wombats’ punkish thrash, Moving to New York, and the 1930s newsreels of graceful Cunard liners making their stately progress down the Mersey; or between the Beatles’ All You Need Is Love and footage of spacemen on the Moon. Was it love that powered the Apollo rockets?

But where Liverpool failed to produce a song to match the era, the show’s canny directors — Nigel Jamieson and Jayne Casey — gleefully hijacked tunes from wherever. Thus Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring pounded away to accompany the wacky performance art of the 1960s, and Amazing Grace popped up to mark the most shameful period in Liverpool’s history: its acquiescence in the 18th-century slave trade.

What saved the show from turning into an all-singing dog’s dinner was its high-tech slickness. From the surreal, Pythonesque cartoons of the 19th-century segment (a monstrous Queen Victoria swallowing cargo ships whole) and the rope-dancers twisting 30ft in the air, to the spectacular deployment of the excellent Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in dozens of little boxes stacked six storeys high (the conductor, Vasily Petrenko, keeping time from a crow’s nest high above the stage), the visual element was brazen and breathtaking.

But it was the music that gave the show heart and soul. Hundreds of amateur singers and brass players came and went. Connie Lush belted out I Put a Spell on You with a voice like a 3am whisky and enough electricity to power the national grid.

Pete Wylie, whose gold-lamé suit was a cabaret in itself, delivered Heart as Big as Liverpool as if his life depended on everyone joining in. Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian Broudie, Dave Stewart, Shack, No Fakin DJs, the Christians and the Farm all made punchy contributions.

And Ringo Starr — greeted like a returning prodigal — led a mass singalong of With a Little Help from My Friends and Power to the People, and gave us another chance to lament his dire new single, Liverpool 8. But it was a brilliant young Scouse rapper called RiUvEn who epitomised the spirit of the night — cheeky, quick-witted, brimming with energy.

Errors and omissions? The absence of You’ll Never Walk Alone — anthem of the Anfield Kop — seemed odd. One disturbingly weird film sequence showed people appearing to throw themselves off buildings. And, as in Friday’s opening ceremony, everything stopped for a sentimental procession of schoolkids carrying illuminated boxes — I know not why.

But these are quibbles. If the other 360 events planned by the Capital of Culture have a fraction of this show’s infectious exuberance, Liverpool will have a year to remember.

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