YORK loves rudery and ruddy humour, shows best enjoyed by stags and hens on a night's curry and booze.

"Love Shack, baby, Love Shack, that's where it's at; huggin' and a kissin', dancin' and a lovin', wearin' next to nothin'", you couldn't put it better than the B-52's chart-topping oddity that inspired Kim Gavin and Dan Peak's boisterous musical.

Director and choreographer Gavin and writer Peak have put the tack in Love Shack, a cavalier new disco musical that knows it is naff, banal and camp and full of banana innuendo and yet somehow crosses the finishing line with a big, cheesy, winning grin on its face.

They have grafted B-list celebrities from pop's 21st century graveyard - S Club 7's sweet Jon Lee, Steps' statuesque Faye Tozer and Hear'Say's mini Tom Jones, Noel Sullivan - on to a musical melange of John Godber's nightclub comedy Bouncers, the flat-sharing antics of America's ubiquitous Friends and the BBC's equally over-familiar Men Behaving Badly.

Stir in the sauce from good old English pantomime, and everything is conducted with the joie de vivre of Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday, but as if Confessions' lothario Robin Asquith were at the wheel.

Love Shack steers an anything but smooth course through true love as the best laid plans clash with the best planned lays in the flat of Sam (Lee) and Will (cheeky chipmunk Sullivan), whose only possessions are a Jordan framed poster, a torch and a clock. The bachelor life is blitzed once chef Sam proposes to Joanne (Emma Barton), who moves in with her entourage of gobby AJ (Rachael Wooding) and clothes horse Bonnie (Tozer's Joanna Lumley tribute) never far behind. Cue stag and hen party headaches.

Gavin and Peak have got the karaoke selection box and lively choreography well sorted, from Psychedelic Shack to It's Raining Men, Go West to Express Yourself, topped off by a splendidly daft rendition of ELO's Telephone Line. Gary Barlow's new weepie, Sometimes Never Always, fits in well; Sullivan is a comic find; Neal Wright's singing postman is a scream; but the script still needs work. The breakfast scene and the attention-seeking Austin Powers-style narrator deserve a red card.

Box office: 0870 606 3595

Updated: 10:54 Wednesday, May 04, 2005