The Hello Girls, Heart Strings Theatre in association with Hayes Theatre Company, 10 January -4 February

 One of the challenges of international travel is, occasionally you miss shows that are playing at home. Fortunately, sometimes they come back - such is the case with this production that premiered in Canberra back in September, now back for a season at the Hayes.

And it's certainly worth the trip to catch this cast, a strong ensemble who give the show powerful energy and charm. The subject, the women who were selected by the US Army to work as telephone operators in the European war, is certainly an intriguing and undertold story. There's a lot of good stylish choices in the production...

So why am I not completely enthusiastic about this? Well, largely it's the material - Peter Mills' lyrics and music rarely rise above the serviceable, and the characters mostly lack depth. While it's an unfamiliar story, the style is very familiar - empowerment ballads, the spunky competent women being underestimated then wowing everybody with little more than token resistance. We never really get a sense of anything being much of a challenge or a struggle, and there's never really a doubt that the women will win through (the historic disappointment they had post-war as the army dismissed their work is mostly confined to a footnote). 

There's also a couple of moments of direction I was not in love with - moments when the character singing wasn't given focus so I had to hunt around the stage to find them, and one moment of choreography which felt distinctly tacky. For the most part, I find it a professionally staged production of a show that is a perfectly okay Theatre In Education piece but probably shouldn't be the work of a major music theatre company looking to be the cutting edge of the form. 

Again, I enjoyed the work of the cast quite a lot. Rhianna McCourt leads with power as Grace, Kira Leiva gives good sneaky sidekick as Suzanne, Nikola Gucciardo is loveable as the naive Helen, Kaitlin Nihill is powerful as the uberfrench Louise, Joel Hutchings is toughly stern as Riser, Matthew Hearne is playful and charming as Matterson and David Hooley gives strong authority as General Pershing. But there's only so much they can do with material which is distinctly mid-level.