Now that we’re all suffering the after-effects of a spending spree the time is ripe for a revival of Steve Brown and Justin Greene’s musical fable about the 1960s pools winner Viv Nicholson, who learnt the hard way that money buys neither love nor happiness. Craig Revel Horwood’s production of this glorious account of one woman’s inglorious career is a belter, bursting with energy, appetite and coarse humour.

It begins in a tacky northern beauty salon, where the punters come to gawp at the middle-aged Nicholson, her fortune spent. She transports us, aided by Diego Pitarch’s brilliantly economical sets, back to her Yorkshire mining home town and to New York where, intimidated and alcohol-sodden, Nicholson and her husband find that a bite of the Big Apple is more than they can chew.

Brown’s flavoursome score, scintillatingly delivered by the actor-musician cast under Sarah Travis, encompasses gritty folk tunes and rowdy pub singsongs, Sixties pop, even a dash of Gershwin. And the lyrics are pungently precise. “The summers were longer, the beer tasted stronger,” Nicholson sings of her girlhood, until the misty nostalgia clears, revealing a reality of domestic violence, drunkenness and deprivation.

Our bleached-blonde heroine is given a terrific pair of performances by Karen Mann as the narrator Viv and Kirsty Hoiles as her younger self. Mann stalks on to the stage brandishing a trumpet, spits into its end and lifts it to her lips — a brassily defiant prelude to her unsparing, gutsy portrayal. Hoiles is ripely sensual, impulsive and childishly vulnerable; when Keith, the one true love among her string of gold-digging, abusive men, dies in a car crash the two desolate Vivs join in a devastating grief-stricken duet.

Revel Horwood’s choreographic talent is often to the fore. The title number’s staging involves a kickline of bunnygirls, some in drag, all wearing lurid make-up — it’s ludicrously funny, but also points up the grotesquerie of excessive consumption. And the gaudy glamour of Nicholson’s cash-flashing status is continually undermined, her filmstar poses disintegrating as she gleefully flicks V signs at her detractors. She ends up back where she started, but her journey is a hell of a joyride. Gobsmackingly good.

Box office: 01635 46044 to Aug 29

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