Singing nuns, cheering dogs and applauding Nazis - these were a few of my favourite things.

You can add to that a Grand Opera House full of party-poppers going off at the touching (cheesy) moment when the lips of Maria and Captain Von Trapp touch for the first time.

Or maybe the incessant booing and hissing at the appearance of stereotype Nazis and the gold-digging Baroness which made the sing-a-long Sound Of Music the night it was.

This was entertainment at its most basic. Who'd have thought that dressing up in a brown paper package tied up with string and shouting at a cinema screen could be so much fun?

For those who had not seen the film before, and there were only two who owned up to that fact, you could be forgiven for wondering why well-adjusted, professional adults would whoop and wail like children all around them.

The streets of York were beginning to fill with strangely dressed ladies from 6.45pm, with the costumes on display ranging from hastily-prepared habits to the painted faces of marionettes.

More than half the audience had made the effort to dress for this audience-participation movie classic, adding to a charged atmosphere never before witnessed at what amounted to not much more than a night at the cinema.

The pre-show fancy dress competition increased the togetherness of an audience wowed into ecstasy by the appearance on stage of Nazis in full regalia, a huge brown dog and a 6ft 8in Mother Superior.

A group of ten nuns, including a male named Sister Josephine - all performers in local amateur dramatic societies - were there to give it their best at the karaoke-style evening.

Their singing was probably among the best in a crowd, where some of those attempting to Climb Every Mountain were painful to hear to say the least.

Despite the rain many men turned out in lederhosen, and one knobbly-kneed fellow in the queue for the gents said: "You have to do something stupid every so often, but isn't it brilliant?"

It was brilliant, going on fantastic.