Review: Club Tropicana, The Musical, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york

YOU may not have heard of Club Tropicana, The Musical, but you will know all the Eighties' songs – and the one that gave the show its title but is a notable absentee.

As in Wham!'s "Club Tropicana, drinks are free". Not free for audience members, please note, but for the guests at the Club Tropicana Hotel. Or, rather, their first drink, as this holiday resort hotel on the Med is in danger of being closed down by the hotel inspectors.

First, however, there is a wedding to be called off as Karina Hind's Lorraine leaves Cellen Chugg-Jones's Olly standing at the aisle, clutching his brick-sized Eighties' mobile phone. ABC's The Look Of Love is the first of many brilliant song choices, apt for each scene in this new musical from writer Michael Gyngell, director Samuel Holmes and fellow director/choreographer Nick Winston.

Lorraine and her friends, man-eating Andrea (Tara Verloop) and eat-everything-else Tracey (Rebecca Mendoza), jet off to the honeymoon hotel anyway, and unbeknown to them, so do Olly and his best pals Blaine (Kane Verrall) and Drew (Rory Phelan).

By the time they arrive, we have been introduced to camp, flamboyant, sassy hotel Geordie entertainment manager Garry (Joe McElderry, wholly at home in his first comedy role), with his pink jacket, even pinker shoes and "Spanish trousers". Spanish trousers? "Tight at the back" says Joe, adopting a cod-Spanish accent. "...And er loose here." Andalucia, geddit. Yes, these are the jokes, folks, and they come thick and fast, cheery and cheekily funny, often courtesy of McElderry's garrulous Garry.

By now too, we have met the harassed hotel management team of Robert (Neil McDermott, jacket sleeves perennially rolled up) and Serena (former Sugababes singer Amelle Berrabah in her musical theatre debut), who has long carried a torch for him but never switched it on.

Club Tropicana is already rich with broadly drawn but instantly appealing characters, and writer Gyngell conjures two more: first for impressionist and singer Kate Robbins as Consuela, the blunt-speaking Spanish housekeeper with the wide-legged gait and unpredictable behaviour. Gyngell finds myriad ways to let Robbins show off her gift for impersonation, from Tina Turner to Margaret Thatcher, but her scene-stealling performance is more rounded than that as she vies with McElderry's cheeky chappy for the show's biggest cheers.

There has to be a baddie, one to suffer all the slapstick physical comedy, and Emily Tierney's Christine is a scream,: haughty, tall but always heading for the next pratfall.

Club Tropicana is a big grin of a cheesy and saucy show from start to finish with fun, high-energy performances galore, led by Geordie Joe, coupled with slick, crisp direction, no slack moment and so many Eighties' pop highs, from Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and She Drives Me Crazy to Only You and Relax. Fun and sunshine, there's more than enough for everyone, to misquote the late, lamented George.

Charles Hutchinson