The sun has got his hat on (again)….

No, today’s entry isn’t a weather report, though the sun indeed seems to have his hat on with a final flurry of summer. Instead, of course, I’m referring to Me and My Girl, the 30s Cockney-meets-country gentry musical that became an improbably successful 80s international smash hit when it was presented in an entirely new adaptation by Stephen Fry.

That production – directed by Mike Ockrent and launched at Leicester Haymarket in 1985 before it went on to the West End, Broadway and around the globe – was a delightful throwback to a different era of book-led musical comedy, just as The Boy Friend in the 50s was a delicious reminder of 20s shows, and an early riposte to the earnestness of the Andrew Lloyd Webber era of through-sung musicals (that would become a lot more earnest in the next decade). It was also the one of the first of a new genre of “revisals” – shows from the past that were given a new lease of life (and lick of emotional, musical and scenic paint) with revised books, from Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (revised as Crazy for You and turned into another hit by Ockrent) to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song.

But now that musical comedy has established itself as a dominant genre on Broadway once again in the last few years, from The Producers to Monty Python’s Spamalot (about to open here, too), is there room for another helping of the retro social class and musical theatre politics of Me and My Girl? I travelled down to Plymouth last night for the premiere of a new touring version that has launched there, and it was a pleasure to be reacquainted with such sprightly English musical standards as ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Leaning on a Lamppost’ (an exact mirror for ‘On the Street Where You Live’ in My Fair Lady that Me and My Girl so often resembles in its Pygmalion-like structure of trying to remake its hero into a member of the aristocracy), and the yearningly lovely ‘Once You Lose Your Heart’.

But did I lose my heart to the show once again? Not quite, or at least not yet. I’m surprised that, after just two days of previews, the producers were so keen to unveil the results to critics — last night had a showing of four of us from the London-based nationals, with the Daily Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer, the Sunday Telegraph’s Tim Walker and the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts in attendance besides me. The show isn’t yet quite as tight and fluid as it should be: there are times when the comedy is strenuous instead of effortless. Nor is yet an essential spark of effortless charisma between Richard Frame’s Bill Snibson and Faye Tozer’s Sally Smith that one remembers so fondly from Robert Lindsay and Emma Thompson in those roles. Revivals traditionally suffer the curse of fond memory – it’s sometimes said that they have to be twice as good as the original to stand a chance.

And it didn’t help, either, that our arrival in Plymouth hadn’t been exactly welcoming. All four of us critics had been booked into a rather down-at-heel hotel, the Astor; and then trying to eat at the Theatre Royal’s upstairs café meant dealing with what Charlie called a “Kafka-esque” ordering system in which all orders were taken at a counter by someone manning a solitary till, which took the best part of 15 minutes. Critics shouldn’t expect a red carpet to be rolled out for them – we’re members of the public with free tickets and a notebook, basically – but coming here involves a 7-hour round-trip by train, so it might have benefited the theatre’s management to have noticed we were there at all before we picked up our tickets from the theatre’s charming in-house PR. By then, even though she was as hospitable as she could be (and even rustled up some interval sandwiches to perk us up), the irritations had started building up. Now it wasn’t just memory that the show had to compete with, but the monumental effort of getting here and getting fed were counting against it, too.