Nunsense

Nunsense begins with a catering disaster. Most of a convent's sisters have been killed by a bad batch of soup, the survivors have run out of money to bury the last four, and their solution is to mount a variety show in a borrowed school hall and sell tickets to it.

The five who are left do not agree on much. The Mother Superior wants decorum and cannot maintain it for more than a minute. One sister wants to be a star. One has amnesia and no idea who she is. One is a former ballerina who will take any excuse at all to dance, and one is relentlessly, exhaustingly cheerful. The show they put on keeps derailing into their own arguments, which is the actual entertainment.

Dan Goggin wrote the book, music and lyrics, and it opened in 1985. It went on to become one of the most widely produced musicals of its era and generated a long run of sequels. The appeal is practical as much as comic: a small cast, a single set, and a structure loose enough to absorb whatever a company decides to put into it.

The humour is broad and affectionate rather than satirical - the nuns are ridiculous but never the butt of anything cruel - and the show speaks directly to the audience throughout, which keeps it from settling into ordinary fourth-wall comedy. The songs are pastiche and land better the more sincerely they are sung.

It suits audiences after an evening of straightforward, generous silliness, and companies with five strong comic performers. Live, the direct address is the whole point: the show is pretending you are the audience at its fundraiser, and it commits to that completely.