A musical about labour relations? It sounds improbable but the Pajama Game, written in 1954, is one of a notable line including Pins and Needles and Flora, The Red Menace.
With music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, it is also a prime example of the kind of show Broadway constantly turned out in the 1950s: cheerful, tuneful and immensely professional - without, like so many shows today, attempting to bust any blocks.
The starting point of George Abbott and Richard Bissell's book is a pajama factory romance between a work supervisor, Sid Sorokin, and a militant unionist, Babe Williams. United emotionally, they are divided professionally by a shop floor demand for a 7.5% pay rise. Complications are added when Sid dates the boss's secretary to get the key to the office ledgers, but all ends happily with love triumphant and honest labour winning out over corrupt capital - a reminder of the days when musicals embodied rather than advertised a social conscience.
If I have any cavil at Simon Callow's exuberant production, originating at Birmingham Rep, it is that it opts for a visual style that erodes the difference between shop floor realism and dream sequence fantasy. Frank Stella's designs, while extremely handsome, are consistently expressionist so that the Iowa factory might be a set for Elmer Rice's the Adding Machine, and even the works picnic takes place against a multi-hued, kaleidoscopic backdrop.
But one virtue of the designs is that they clear a space for David Bintley's dazzlingly imaginative choreography: instead of the usual showbiz cliches we get a classic technique applied to Cuban rhythms, particularly in the Hernando's Hideaway scene where faces and bodies shine out of darkness like glow-worms.
This is a dance and music driven show in which a fast tempo country and western number, There Once Was A Man, is delivered by the two leads, Graham Bickley and Leslie Ash, with exhilarating urgency, even if at other times Ms Ash seems a touch regal for a union leader.
But, just as on the Broadway first night Shirley MacLaine whipped up a storm by stepping into the role of the boss's secretary, so here the understudy, Jenny Ann Topham, went on and performed with a leggy panache that augurs well for her future. And John Hegley as her paranoid lover, a time and motion study man, supports her with cartoonish brio. But professionalism is the keynote of a pleasurable show that recalls the days when musicals, instead of bombarding us with sensation, offered us intelligent escapism.
