THIS is the first time a review has been submitted after a night in a Cocktail Bar.

For the record, no drink stronger than God’s Own Country’s tap water was consumed by your reviewer in this newly upholstered adjunct to the De Grey Rooms’ divine Ballroom.

Nevertheless, he experienced double vision by seeing Alexander Wright’s Beulah for a second time, having named it as one of York's Top Ten Cultural Highlights of 2012.

Since that performance in York Theatre Royal’s Studio, Wright has re-written the poetic, beauteous text of his “delicate folk musical”. Welsh multi-instrumentalist Ryland Teifi, meanwhile, has taken over most impressively from Ed Wren to perform alongside Jim Harbourne, Wren’s co-composer of a score with echoes of Sigur Ros, Elbow and the long-neglected Virginia Astley.

Inspired by William Blake’s Romantic writings of Beulah, a portal between this world and the next, often in a state of slumber, Wright has written overlapping love stories involving puppetry, a lion, leap years and so many leaping hearts.

If it were possible, Tom Bellerby’s 2013 production is even more beautiful and moving than before, as uplifting as the Aurora Borealis projections that light up the Cocktail Bar wall.

Wright’s second musical theatre piece, 2011’s Some Small Love Story, suffers by comparison but mainly because Noreen Kershaw’s cast of Samantha Siddall, Callum McArdle, Keir McEwen and Serena Manteghi and their heartbreaking downer is better suited to preceding the extraordinary Beulah.

Two tales of love, one long-lived, the other cut cruelly short, are interlinked in bold, raw storytelling framed by piano music and lyrics by Gavin Whitworth in the manner of Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown.

Your reviewer needed to drift off to Beulah again in his bed by the end.

Beulah and Some Small Love Story, The Flanagan Collective, The Cocktail Bar, De Grey Rooms, York, tonight at 8pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk