YOU’D have to be a killjoy not to appreciate what Queanbeyan Players are up to with their production of “Downtown: The Mod Musical”, coming to Belconnen Community Theatre.

As with “Keating the Musical” last year, it’s one of the Players’ ventures into smaller-scaled venues and is, director Anita Davenport tells me, more a “revuesical” than a musical.

It’s an all-girl show, I find when I turn up for rehearsal and it does actually have a plot.

On stage are five girls only known by colours – the yellow girl, green girl, red girl, blue and orange, variously representing five individual experiences.

The show follows the perspectives of the five girls – the one who married young, a good time girl, a naive girl who’s growing up fast, a dolly girl, and an American who’s come over to England because she’s obsessed with the Beatles. 

They all pour their hearts out in their letters to the teen magazine, “Shout”, but it soon becomes obvious that the magazine’s gossip columnist Gwendoline is increasingly out of touch with the contemporary issues of the time – divorce, the advent of the Pill and the revolutionary strides made by women in the swinging ’60s.

The focus is on the famous UK singers of the era and the singalong numbers will include Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”, Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and “You Don’t Have Say You Love Me”, Lulu’s “To Sir With Love” and the title song, Petula Clark’s “Downtown”, which conjures up not so much New York’s downtown as Britain’s Carnaby Street.

But the “revuesical” is called “Shout” overseas, where people are ignorant that such is the name of a much-loved, bio-musical about Johnny O’Keefe. In the UK and US, it was Lulu who covered that song.

Davenport is a seasoned director best known for having directed “Barnum” for Canberra Philharmonic, but here has the advantage of having listened to her father Ian Davenport’s ’60s favourites in the family car while growing up.

“I heard that music in dad’s car during the ’90s, and if you think about it, the ’60s were only 30 years before that,” she says, explaining why she thinks the songs will resonate across the age-groups. Her favourite is Cilla Black’s “You’re My World”.

“In the ’60s, you had to buy vinyl and the songs had to hook you in and have good stories,” she says.

“It was so common for people to associate a song with their first love or driving for the first time.”

The show won’t be an historical reconstruction, and although designer Helen McIntyre has been working with vintage patterns, her costumes will be “a wonderful bit of whimsy, bright, short and lots of fun”.

It will be much the same with choreography by Laurenzy Chapman who, Davenport says, “has given a nod to the ’60s without being a slave to historical accuracy in the dance moves”.

There’ll be a band on stage, directed by Tara Davidson, who like Davenport, believes the songs need to be sung with a band just as they were written, not with an orchestra.

“Music transports us through space and time,” Davenport says. “I don’t feel you have to have grown up in the ’60s to feel that connection.”

“Downtown: The Mod Musical”, Queanbeyan Players, Belconnen Community Theatre until March 4.