Everyone remembers the Hollywood movie in which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland decide to do the show "right here in the barn". But, since only one of the original Rodgers and Hart Broadway numbers survives in the film, the stage version deserves revival; and, with its celebration of youthful energy and resilience, it proves a perfect choice for third year students of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Admittedly the book is not the greatest but Martin Connor has deftly interwoven the 1937 Broadway original with a 1959 re-write.
So what we see is a group of Cape Cod summer stock apprentices despairing of a turgid drama, The Deep North, on which they're labouring and devising their own barnstorming revue instead.
It is pure showbiz fantasy but it yields a string of classic numbers, including Where or When and The Lady is a Tramp, reminding us how much more interesting Rodgers was when he worked with Hart rather than Hammerstein.
The fascinating feature of Lorenz Hart's lyrics is the way they graft adult experience on to late adolescent characters. Sexual sophistication, for instance, is perfectly evoked in I Wish I Were In Love Again with its reference to "the faint aroma of performing seals, the double-crossing of a pair of heels": heady stuff for quarrelling youngsters. And My Funny Valentine, where the heroine announces "your looks are laughable, unphotographable", reeks of mid-life knowingness.
But it is precisely the show's mix of emotional realism with youthful vitality that gives it its charm.
Connor's production also boasts a budding star in Charlotte Allam who, as an itinerant Bohemian galvanising these stage-struck youngsters, gets most of the best numbers. Allam, who resembles a young Stockard Channing, delivers them with a blend of impishness and assurance that takes the breath away. Elsewhere there is good work from Christopher Fry as an idealistic tunesmith and Kesty Morrison as a precocious Hollywood starlet. But it's the ensemble verve that counts along with Bill Deamer's inventive choreography and the ebullience of a first rate pit band under Jae Alexander's baton.
The show itself is a hymn to the self confidence of a rising generation and that is perfectly caught by the Guildhall's own bright eyed babes.
· Until Wednesday. Box office: 020 7382 7192
