FOUR years on from Shipton Theatre Company unzipping the amateur UK stage premiere of The Full Monty in York, Robert Readman revisits that triumph for an even hotter production at the Grand Opera House.

It is bigger too in every way, from the very start when Oliver Tattersfield’s butch gay stripper, Buddy ‘Keno’ Walsh, reveals himself (well, not quite all of himself) to be not a chunk but the full bar of hunk.

Readman has decided to spread the show beyond the stage into the boxes, from where the whooping and hollering female chorus eggs on the male strippers and leads the audience cheers at the infamous climax. More of that later.

Readman, musical director Michael Thompson and choreographer Lesley Hill have reconvened to unleash once more the Broadway musical version of the 1997 film that jettisons Hot Chocolate and Tom Jones for soulful, brassy new songs by David Yazbek. The boys now put the ‘buff’ into Buffalo, New York, where the language is even hotter but the steel mill’s fires have gone cold and the lads have been made redundant.

The muscular music and the new American setting of Yazbek and Terrence McNally’s musical turn up the heat another notch – and add another layer of saucy fun in the humorous ensemble dance numbers It’s A Woman’s World and Michael Jordan’s Ball – without sacrificing the original blend of pathos and broad comedy in the story of six redundant men fighting back by daring to become a strip act.

Readman cannily has blended old and new in his cast. Martin Lettin reprises the lead role of divorced, hot-headed former prisoner and natural leader Jerry Lukowski, singing better than ever as he seeks to save his relationship with his son, Nathan (the supremely confident Josh Benson – watch that name).

The lithe Antonie Williams-Brown is back too as Horse, the veteran jive-dancing black dude; so too is John Hall, orange-tanned to the max as white-collar victim Harold Nichols.

In come Nik Briggs, a brilliant new addition as fat lad Dave Bukatinsky; Adam Sowter as the spectacularly endowed yet oddball Ethan and Stuart Rae, as the suicidal gay mummy’s boy Malcolm, whose warm-voiced rendition of You Walk With Me is one of the high points.

The females are not to be outdone. Sandy Nicholson’s acid queen of a chain-smoking rehearsal pianist, Jeanette, is the most outrageous, closely followed by Charlie Young’s Estelle Genovese, while Liz Nicholson’s despairing Pam Lukowski, Alicia Roberts’s concerned, loving Georgie Bukatinsky and Jessica Hardcastle’s holiday-loving Vicki Nichols all add to the pathos.

Readman’s show has style and steel, tears and fun, heaps of humour and more sauce than a ketchup bottle, and it rises with impressive momentum to the clothes-shredding finale, where you will indeed see an eyeful. Maybe even more than you bargained for if the lighting is not bolstered to be as dazzling as the show itself.