CHANCES are that you won’t know Shout! The Mod Musical but you will know the songs, each as familiar as your daily route to work.

The show takes a joyous journey through the groovy decade you’re not supposed to remember if you were there, but if you weren’t there, you have since absorbed its culture because the Sixties have become so ubiquitous, so pervasive, the ultimate era in pop propaganda.

Then again, the music really was the bee's knees, especially the iconic hits of Petula, Cilla, Dusty, Shirley Bassey and Nancy Sinatra and it is those distaff songs that provide the soundtrack to this fun ride through the lives, loves and issues that “all women will relate to” and too many men still struggle to understand.

Those issues are refracted through the breezy musical’s five female caricatures, Jo Theaker’s Orange, Marie Louise Surgenor-Scott’s Green, Lauren Sheriston’s Yellow, Vicky Lightfoot-Smith’s Blue and late replacement Kelly Stocker’s Red, all dressed in colour code – and far removed from Quentin Tarantino’s use of colours for names in Reservoir Dogs – with a changing wardrobe to suit the accompanying swift-moving vignettes.

Shout! director, choreographer and designer Nik Briggs, YSM’s new artistic director, plans to focus on Independent Women in five musicals over the next two years, and this week’s jukebox musical is a precursor to that showcase, being more of a look at the lives of the everyday everywoman – wife, mother, sister, daughter, slut – as they experienced sexual liberation, the pill, dope and women’s rights when the dam of post-war gloom finally broke.

Briggs himself provides the voiceover for each scene, as perky and cheeky as Channel 4’s Come Dine With Me presenter, announcing the theme of each edition of the imaginary Shout! magazine.

Meanwhile, each of the all-singing, all-dancing, white-booted girls poses a confessional question to the mag’s agony aunt, Gwendoline Holmes (voiced by York actress Andrina Carroll), who is rather more Mary Whitehouse than Mary Quant.

Against a rising and falling Sixties montage that brings musical director and arranger Stephen Hackshaw, fellow keyboard player Barbara Chen and drummer Sam Boyes in and out of view, the fabulous five deliver knock-out versions of so many favourites.

Bridlington-born Jo Theaker, newly moved to York after roles aplenty on TV and at theatres nationwide, makes a sensational YSM debut: she is a pocket dynamo with drama in her phrasing.

Marie Louise Surgenor-Scott revels in the mini-skirted, hot-to-trot Green, especially on the saucy revamp of the James Bond Theme and Goldfinger.

Vicky Lightfoot-Smith purrs aplenty as a self-knowing glamour-puss and excels in her You’re My World/All I See Is You duet with Theaker, while Kelly Stocker’s Red blossoms touchingly behind the bespectacled front.

Lauren Sheriston is a knockout on the York stage yet again: a precocious teenage talent just waiting to burst out. What a pair of lungs she has, whether singing Son Of A Preacher Man or Shout.

Shout it out loud: this fun and fruity show deserves bigger audiences, so head Downtown to the JoRo tonight or tomorrow.

Shout! The Mod Musical, York Stage Musicals, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tonight at 7.30pm; tomorrow at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or on the door.