It's the sort of question that thrills trivia buffs: which show beat West Side Story to the 1958 Tony Award for Best Musical? The answer is The Music Man, an extraordinary success for one-hit wonder Meredith Willson. The piece itself boasts one overwhelming hit in Seventy-Six Trombones, but when a song is this catchy - and judiciously repeated - it's hard to go far wrong.

Rachel Kavanaugh's delightfully lively production is just the thing to banish the credit-crunch blues, and had Chichester's normally resolutely sedentary audience en masse on its feet at the end. All the elements are in place: fine voices, great looks from set and costumes and, best of all, delicious choreography from Stephen Mear, who has the actors choo-choo-ing like steam trains to start and bounding about with books on their heads for the library scene.

Convincing chemistry from the two leads is the only way to navigate the thinness of the plot and this is something that Brian Conley and Scarlett Strallen don't manage, accomplished as they are individually.

"Professor" Harold Hill sells musical instruments to good townsfolk with the promise of forming their children into a brass band but scarpers without teaching a note. Stern librarian Marian Paroo has his number yet, this being a musical, proceeds not so much to fall as collapse for Hill. We struggle to buy this, as well as the mitigating argument that the professor has galvanised formerly staid River City, Iowa.

But who cares about logic when there are heels to be kicked up? Jenny Galloway has great fun as the redoubtable wife of the sceptical mayor and there are repeated interludes from a mellifluous barber shop quartet. As for that ovationinducing finale, it's the oomphiest bit of oom-pa in ages.

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