This musical play set in a prison is the inaugural professional production at the newly named Derby Theatre. Formerly the Playhouse, it has reopened under a partnership between the University of Derby and the City Council after an 18-month closure. Its audience needs re-establishing, so a populist choice for the season’s first show is understandable. But it’s a shame that Tim Elgood’s comedy doesn’t counter its easy laughs with drama a little less lightweight.

Elgood is a professional social worker of 35 years’ experience, so he’s qualified to bring authenticity to an evocation of life inside. Instead, he opts for crudely drawn lags and obvious gags, laced with well-worn pop songs performed with gusto in Steven Dexter’s production by a cast of actor-musicians.

When a rock star, Kieran O’Connell (Stephen Gray), the lead singer of a band called Transit Van Ordinaire, is sent down for perjury, he decides to start a prisoners’ band — but reckons without the machinations of a bent screw and a notorious psychopath. Will the group ever get to play live?

Even if the answer wasn’t so predictable, this fragmented piece would lack tension. Ziggy (Stuart Neal), a bright spark who’s doing time for burglary but who, like almost everyone here, is essentially a salt-of-the-earth type, acts as narrator, filling us in on his fellow inmates’ circumstances before each of them bursts abruptly into song. Lyrics and melodies are strained to the limit and beyond to fit the story’s demands: the Pretenders’ Brass in Pocket is rapped by a street-smart drug dealer; Kieran belts out Springsteen just before being banged up, prompting the observation that if he was indeed Born to Run perhaps he should have run faster. Sacrilegiously, Radiohead’s classic Creep goes to a lovelorn accountant convicted of embezzlement.

There is the occasional sharp line, but many more induce a groan. In education sessions, led by Nicole Faraday’s improbable pencil-skirted teacher, the men study Othello: cue troubled, sensitive black prisoner Curtis (Leon Lopez) warbling John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, and jokes about Shakespearean characters called Lumbago, Casino and Desdemonia. Those happy to laugh along and tap their feet to the tunes might be prepared to overlook its limitations. But there’s nothing real, and certainly nothing rock’n’roll, about this sanitised show.

Box office 01332 255800, to Nov 21

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