If you need a show to which you can take your parents and your grandparents as well as your teenage children on a cold winter's night, look no further!  This is a fast-moving hymn of praise to those wonderful songs of the mid 60s.  The Heather Brothers have taken the style and content - and sometimes even the intros - of favourite numbers of the period and given us a close affectionate parody of both words and music.

Set in a go-go club run by middle-aged groover Eric "Rubber legs" de Vene (Gordon Kenney), it takes place at a single Saturday night rave-up.  This is an excuse for a succession of joyous numbers performed with an abundance of energy, combined with brief insights into teenage angst.

Gary is a cocksure young man of great charm whose rampant sexuality keeps getting the best of him, to the dismay of his girlfriend Sue.  Eddie is the know-it-all pill-popping reckless type who boasts of his success with the ladies and has set his cap at the girl known as frigid Bridget.  And Rick is a sweet and unsure youth who dares not admit that he is a virgin although deeply attracted to Sharon who dares not admit she isn't.

As the show was written from the male perspective, the female characters are not so sympathetically delineated although the tender love affair between Rick (Ian Brandon) and Sharon (Ciaran O'Keefe) is very moving and Sarah Langton as Sue has ample opportunity to show off her lusty singing.

All in all it's a perfect holiday show for all ages.

Aline Waites

It's becoming something of a Christmas and New Year tradition for pop music nostalgia freaks to flock to Upstairs at the Gatehouse for the annual festive musical.  Following the great success of From a Jack to a King and It's Only Make Believe, this year's offering is a revival of the show in which Dennis Waterman starred in the West End.

The heart-warming and humorous tale is set in a London disco, Club A Go Go, circa 1963-1964 - and deals with the clumsy attempts of three young girls and three young men to attract the opposite sex.

The show pokes affectionate fun at the fashions, culture and music of that Beatles-inspired period - pitched somewhere between the death throes of rock 'n' roll and the arrival of flower power and free love.

Whereas other similar musicals have parodied the music of the 50s and 60s by using actual songs from the period, A Slice of Saturday Night is a lot cleverer.  The writers, the Heather Brothers, have come up with an excellent repertoire of original songs that pay homage to the musical styles of the day, without actually copying any of them.  All the songs sound like something familiar .... and then they don't.  Recognisable riffs, hooks and phrases are interwoven with their own stuff and it's great fun spotting the influences.

Experienced Gordon Kenney, in the central role of club owner Eric "Rubber Legs" de Vene, holds everything together very well and is superbly supported by a young and talented cast, in which Jessica Williams, as Frigid Bridget and Sarah Langton, a graduate of Sir Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, as Sue, are the outstanding singers.

Anyone aged around fiftysomething will find the non-stop foot-tapping, hand clapping action of this show hard to resist but it will also strike a chord with anyone who's ever been 17.

I defy anyone to leave this show without a smile on their face and a happy heart.

Tony Allcock