AN impromptu chorus from a mass of wellheeled Free-Bus- Pass-Flashers bewailing the trials of adolescent love is decidedly eerie.

This is a big budget bumson- seats job from Bill Kenwright and it provides a nostalgic fantasy of life in the 1960s for the audience, who were pretty much to a man all there to witness it first-hand.

Sparsely written by uberduo Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, the team behind many of TV’s most popular comedies, it peppers a classic tale of teenage love with issues of race, morality and culture clashes. It harks back to an era when petrol was an outrageous “four bob a gallon”. It shows a summer holiday when two Luton Girls meet some “oversexed, overpaid and over here” GIs at a base in Lowestoft.

The music is that of another prolific team, Americans Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Their 500- song catalogue has thankfully been pruned down to 30 hits for the show and include Please Mr Postman, Be My Baby and an immense Turn Me Loose. The multitasking company play, sing and dance, with some very cute choreography and outrageously cool lighting design.

The budget was maybe blown a little on the sets and lights, as costume changes were at a minimum. When our lovely heroine, Marie (a sweet, angelic-voiced Elizabeth Carter) asks her older, wiser sister if she looks okay, I felt like heckling that she’d been wearing the same dress for a week.

This is all highly entertaining, if the pace of the songs becomes a little relentless. Seven have thankfully been scythed off since I saw the show last year, but I still wanted more gags and less dances in the same outfits.

This is good clean(ish) fun which all boppin’ romantics will dig. Carry on Kenwright.

Until Saturday. Box office 08448-112121 and online theatreroyal.co.uk