This was a crying shame: a collection of some of the best individual performances you’ll see on a student stage (musical or otherwise), undermined by some lumpen directing and dancing that would make John Sergeant blush (one for you bourgeois BBC viewers out there).

The show starts on the bummest of bum notes, a mish-mash of bad harmonizing that prepares the audience for the low-spots of the group numbers that will marr most of the first half of the show. And yet, even in this gloom, positives start to appear: Jonathan Kanagasooriam as Nicely-Nicely Johnson is and remains a pillar of strength despite everything around him, singing and swaggering with the sort of charisma sadly lacking from the group scenes.

And it’s here – in these scenes – that the show really shoots itself in the foot. This is a combination of two factors. Firstly, despite the best efforts of Dance Captain/Milk Monitor Tadhgh Barwell O'Connor, the choreography is pretty leaden. O’Connor is symptomatic of the wider problems of some of the other dancers, who combined the steely-cold eyes of an assassin (never a good idea in a musical that tries to make enjoyment infectious) with a violence and deliberateness of movement that makes it look like they’re trying to stamp through the stage.

But the buck cannot stop there. The finger must be leveled fairly accusatorily at director Uri Adiv for trying to fit a West End-sized chorus on a Royal Court-sized stage, and then for trying to clutter it with all sorts of additional gunk. The number that opened the second half of the show even featured a man on a chair sitting fairly centrally downstage. Adiv may have reasoned that this positioning only affected a few unlucky souls, but when one of them is your reviewer it’s probably wise to finding a way of not putting the “blocking” in “where the fuck was the blocking?”.

It’s occasionally hard to divorce bad acting from bad direction, but I honestly believe that most of the speaking parts in this can hold their heads high (and, indeed, the rest of the cast, who mainly have The Powers That Be to blame). Ned Stuart-Smith and Tara Crabbe were wonderful as the play’s secondary love interest, singing some touchingly intimate duets that were only undermined by a glacial amount of movement (the direction again, for my money). Stuart-Smith in particular brought his undeniably strong voice to bear on some of the show’s best numbers, making ‘Luck Be A Lady Tonight’ one of its highlights.

Even better was Oli Hunt as Nathan Detroit, who managed to fuse an accent that was pitch-perfect Brando with the wiry sexuality that made you understand why Adelaide (Melanie Heslop) had stuck by him for 14 years. And it was his relationship with Heslop that provided most of the show’s high spots; ‘Adelaide’s Lament’ towards the end of the first act was outstanding, mixing a perfectly nuanced spunky onstage presence with jaw-droppingly good vocals. Heslop, in fact, was so good that she almost single-handedly redeemed the show when it started to lag – the wizened ball-sacks who think musical theatre demands less of a performer should think again and book themselves in for something of a masterclass.

Ultimately, this wasn’t all bad. The second half was certainly more energetic (and, consequently, more exciting) than the first, with a fantastic version of ‘Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat’ (Kanagasooriam again) stealing the show, and I really cannot stress the quality of the individual speaking performances (cheeky mention for Tom Cane, too, as Lt. Brannigan). But I wish someone – hopefully the director – would tell the whole cast that this is supposed to be FUN. The hugely enthusiastic reaction of the audience provides enough evidence that people in Cambridge want to be entertained – I so, so, so hope that they get what they deserve, and that the people who have clearly worked so hard on this show get it, too. By George Reynolds