Stepping Out. a West End musical gem with a laugh and smile.

Stepping Out - A West End musical gem with a laugh and smile.

According to those in the Hollywood hierarchy it isn't how you start it's how you finish. From start to finish Stepping Out, now at the Vaudeville Theatre in London's West End, is a rib tickling, hilarious, foot stomping, thigh slapping, rattling and ripping yarn and musical that will leave you begging for more and emerging from the theatre grinning like a ginger cat.

Stepping Out, set in 1983, captures perfectly the whole mood and style of the early 1980s with both razor sharp precision and almost uncanny accuracy. It's one of those dazzling West End productions that is both tongue in cheek, witty, beautifully paced and has only the occasional moments of seriousness and drama. But here again the West End excelled itself in the only way it knows. Stepping Out was almost victoriously impressive in the way it handled even the most delicate relationships between some of the on stage performers.

Still here was Stepping Out, a story about a wannabe and aspirational dancing troupe who throw themselves whole heartedly into their rehearsals, conquering all the setbacks that life had presented them with. It was the kind of musical that reminded you of those hazy, crazy but far from lazy days of the 1980s when all of those wonderful new inventions and gadgets suddenly appeared overnight.

Starring former East End stars Tracy Ann Oberman and Tamzin Outhwaite with the ever fragrant Amanda Holden providing her incomparable touch of showbiz class to the proceedings, you began to believe that Hollywood may have had a point when it claimed there was no business like show. Holden, of course is one of our most established of all celebrities and seems to be so popular and fashionable that there may come a day when she'll appear on TV and the West End stage at the same time.

So it was that Stepping Out closely followed the 1980s script to perfection. Of course the 1980s were both ground breaking, revolutionary and innovative without ever pausing for breath. You must remember it, that very creative period when everything seemed to happen overnight. There was the mobile phone that uncannily resembled a brick, the London City traders on the Stock Exchange floor with their red braces and their materialistic desires and dreams, pointing fingers and shouting furiously on their mobile phones, those vast computers that churned out sentence after sentence of green letters and weird numerical sequences. It almost seemed as if the Internet could only have been considered as wildly unthinkable.

The story of Stepping Out reminded you of that other 1980s TV phenomenon Fame where the cream of America's fleet footed dancers called themselves Fame. The opening credits showed young hoofers jumping over New York taxis and generally creating the kind of spectacle that transfixed every ambitious hopeful who could only have fantasised about tripping the light fantastic.

A group of young girls with an intense passion for dancing, giggling, joking and gossiping. simply gripped the audience with their dry, often biting humour and joshing as well as their frequent jibes and cutting remarks. Throughout Stepping Out we follow the lives of five women desperate to hit the big time but never sure how to get there. Amanda Holden is splendidly pretentious, prissy and puritanical without ever going over the top.

All of the girls argue and fall out, openly criticise each other's personal faults and deficiencies, carefully analysing each other's idiosyncrasies without ever completely pushing aside or alienating one or any of the other. In the privacy of a local hall they don their flashy leotards with an almost total disregard of fashion sense. Then there were the pop socks in purple, yellow, red, orange or green, a rainbow of footwear that somehow illustrated and epitomised the 1980s in two and half glorious hours of West End musical gold. The dancers then go through their paces with quite the funniest of self deprecating one liners.

The more sceptical of critics would probably have described this as the height of cheesiness and kitsch, a cavalcade of candy floss frivolity. But Stepping Out does hit the right notes at the right time without ever descending into over sentimentality. It has a rich gloss and varnish which, while never superlatively outstanding, did leave you feeling enormously emotional and appreciative. Here was the West End doing what it does best.

Stepping Out was one of those all singing, all dancing spectaculars that took you right back to those halcyon days of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, of a thousand tapping feet that never seemed to stop tapping. And that was followed by another dizzying climax of high kicking and cane twirling where everybody believed in the impossible. Then it was sadly and regrettably over and everybody had to go home because it was late and you had to get up for work the following morning. But this was dancing at its quickest and best, a terpischorean treat with twinkling toes, shining mirrors in the Vaudeville Theatre lobby and those sweeping staircases where royalty once rubbed shoulders with high society. Stepping Out certainly took a huge step back in time and maybe you'll feel considerably better for having seen it. I'll give it a thumbs up.