The CUMTS Gala Night is a pretty strange institution, when you think about it. Surely only a psychopath could enjoy hit showtunes from different musicals one after the other after the other for near 90 minutes – the relentless ending crescendos, the glitter, the snapping fingers, the tits and the teeth. It’s all very well watching an actual musical, which conveniently has downtime for dialogue and dull filler numbers so your mind can have nice break from being blown. But the barnstorming highlights all laid end to end?  Surely the terrifying, unremitting twinkly bombast of it all would drive even the most emotionally stable completely insane.

Well, the audience were driven insane on Tuesday night, in their own way. Rousing cheers greeted just about anything that happened – it’s the Broadway way to get the audience on their feet by the end or die trying. I don’t begrudge this -  I was involved with the 24-Hour Musical a while back and was shocked to see people standing and applauding something that had been whipped up by exhausted caffeinated brains in a matter of hours. It’s part of the experience to join in the good cheer and let your emotions be wrenched this way and that.

The ensemble duly wrenched us back and forth with a series of near pitch-perfect renditions of generally solidly canonical works. We had Mary Galloway and Henry Jenkinson belt out ‘Tonight’ with magnificent grace and all the simplicity of staging and perfomance that that mighty music demands; Rochelle Thomas lending her ever-chirpy stage persona and fine technique to ‘Gimme Gimme’; and Rosie Brown give a nicely poised ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ (although I worry that the legacy of Anne Hathaway has defined the song a tad – a straight, untearstreaked unbreathy version now seems weirdly dated).

The host Guy Woolf gave a brusque antidote to all the wide-eyed earnestness musical theatre can induce in its acolytes: “A terrible song from a terrible show”, he says cheerfully following a cheese-filled rendition of ‘Tell Me More’ from Grease, and later introduces a slightly out-of-place Tom Rasmussen delivering ‘Man in the Mirror’ sighing, “we have to acknowledge the jukebox musical – that it’s there”. And it’s certainly true that cheese has a limited shelf-life  - as I say, those final crescendoes and sustained notes can be maddening laid end to end. So thank God for the dramatic skill of Ellie Nunn, whose ‘Send in the Clowns’ was of eye-wateringly high standard – full of pathos, bitter humour and gorgeously subtle vocals.

Most of all, the show triumphed in its use of ‘Let’s Go Fly a Kite’, possibly the greatest song ever written, as the closing number. It was in the same spirit that suffused the show – far more potent than any single performer: joyously, boundlessly uplifting, it summed up an evening of fine spirits, paying tribute to the wonders of childhood and the power of music to simply cheer us all up. The sooner it is made our national anthem the better.

Woolf’s opening number was taken from Neil Patrick Harris’s Tony awards hosting, a lovely ditty about how heterosexual theatre is nowadays (sadly flattened a bit by opening nerves). Apparently musicals are not just for “the gays and the Jews / and the sad embittered malcontents who write the reviews”. This malcontent at least was happy to revel for an evening in the totally ridiculous but tirelessly heartening glow of musical theatre.