CUMTS’ jealousy of the ADC’s 24 Hour Plays finally got too much to bear. In their first attempt at their very own 24-hour production, the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society have managed to create an impressive if slightly rambunctious evening of made-up musicality.

The play had the vaguely unifying theme of ‘the end of the world’, borne out in rather obvious doomsday-proclaiming TLS mock-ups. Yet the show turned its shabby chic to its advantage, with seemingly exhausted Creative Director and compère Guy Woolf poking fun at the hastily-assembled set and his own exhausted inability to form a coherent sentence. A key move in such a last-minute production is getting the audience on-side, and once Woolf had done this the show could go jauntily on.

Indeed, things weren’t entirely plain sailing (nor did anyone expect it to be): to call the show rough-round-the-edges is perhaps an understatement. Lines were forgotten (or read unsubtly from scripts by Martha Bennett), voices dipped in and out of tune. Yet these slip-ups were surprisingly occasional for a play with only a single day’s worth of rehearsals, and served largely to remind its audience of what a bloody good job the performers were doing the rest of the time.

Other than the odd exception (I’m still somewhat in the dark as to what exactly Robbie Aird was on about), the lyrics were of such a high standard that it seems important to credit the entire group of lyricists: Lian Wilkinson, Daniel Henry Kaes, Fred Maynard, Matt Pullen, Alex MacKeith, Catherine Cutts and Jack Gamble did a great job of staying just on the right side of cheesy, pulling out of the bag lines worthy of any West End show. An obvious improvement would have been the coherence of the narrative: each scene was presented as a self-contained entity, which gave the show a disjointed feel.

When it comes to the music itself, it is hard not to be impressed by the virtuosity of Jeff Carpenter & Co. Though the inherently repetitive nature of musical theatre scores worked in the musicians’ favour, the unpredictable stage action certainly did not. The musicians’ ability to keep up with understandably imperfect performers rivalled that of a professional pit band.

The performers absolutely threw themselves into it, belting out recently-learned musical numbers with all the energy and confidence of a mainshow, even when they occasionally forgot the words. I’m thinking in particular of comedy dab hand Emma Powell, who despite turning an entire verse into ‘la’ was undoubtedly the stellar act of the night. Draped in a huge cat-print dressing gown, marching about her ‘bunker for one’ and surrounded by ‘a hundred breeds of cats’, she oozed comic virtuosity.

Though certainly no match for some of CUMTS more polished offerings, those who came prepared for something slightly more “rugged” were pleasantly surprised. Cambridge students are masters of the last minute, and last night was no exception.