Hot Flush

There were other blokes there, accompanying their wives or partners (as I was), but we were outnumbered at least 25 to one by the ladies.

But what laughs we had! Well, we'd have been foolhardy not to chortle along with the women in the audience who found plenty to laugh about as they recognised (or in some younger cases anticipated) their own menopausal moments and saw their own thoughts about men reflected in this exuberant, jolly and indeed very funny musical which features the lives of four women friends going through what's euphemistically referred to as "The Change".

It isn't a show for the prudish. It's about women's relationships with men and about sex. Words are not minced and blushes not spared.

It's great fun, though. There are some super songs, a couple of them familiar tunes with new lyrics but mostly lively now offerings from Olly Ashmore written specially for this show, which is one of two musicals with a similar theme going around at present (if the other is better than this, I'll be greatly surprised).

The cast are terrific: Sheila Ferguson as the pneumatic wife of a lacklustre man who finds solace with an 18-year-old stud; Marti Webb as a widow in search of new romance; the engagingly droll Rachel Izen playing the wife of a man who hides himself a way in his garden shed leaving her with a mucky-minded vicar as her only romantic interest; Catherine Digges as the lawyer wife whose husband has left her for a pole dancer.

Fine performances all round. But the tour de force comes from Sam Kane, the only man in the company (the band are all women too), having great fun playing a dozen or so roles from the aforementioned athlete and vicar to the wayward husband and the camp manager of a speed-dating agency.

What a showman! What a show! The audience loved it - even the men, who had been forced to laugh at ourselves rather a lot.

Mike Priestley