STAGE REVIEW: Sister Act - at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Monday, December 5 to Saturday, December 10, 2016.

WITHOUT doubt this is bold, it’s also brash, lively and has the cast-iron guarantee that it is surely loud!

Based on the hit movie starring Whoopi Goldberg and Maggie Smith, it’s been selling seats like hot cakes locally for some time and its well worth the effort of getting one.

Set in the 1970s, with Philadelphia soul music all the rage, this Broadway and West End hit musical comedy, opens in a downtown night club where Deloris Van Cartier, a disco diva, not only fails her audition but also sees a murder committed.

Agreeing to be a police witness she needs a safe haven… under-cover in a run-down Catholic church in the heart of the city among its motley group of sisters.

Surely the criminal element will be ‘nun’ the wiser! Especially with Christmas coming up.

Deloris, delightfully played by Joanna Francis, throws those well laid plans out of the pulpit when she takes on the mantle of ‘choir mistress’ and has her fellow ‘sisters’ finding their voices. Cue media, national and international interest in the sensational sounds of the sisters of All Angels as they bring the crowds back to the church.

Even the Pope himself is impressed into paying a visit.

It’s great fun which gets off at a steady if not sluggish pace, before gathering for a sprint finish that could easily outrun a cop car in a high speed chase.

Joanna Francis has a power-packed voice, evocative of Tina Turner in her prime, and she has great stage presence in abundance. Surely born for showbiz.

Great style, delivery and splendidly backed by her sisters including Sarah Goggin (Sister Mary Robert) and Allison Harding (Sister Mary Theresa), along with Karen Mann’s fine Mother Superior.

Impressing elsewhere were Jon Robyns as Eddie, the cop with a continuing schoolboy crush on Deloris, Aaron Lee Lambert’s suitably suited, booted and menacing crime boss Curtis, and Tim Maxwell-Clarke’s money-orientated Monsignor O’Hara.

The fingerprints of Strictly Come Dancing’s Craig Revel Horwood are clearly all over this production. He’s both directed and choreographed the show.

It’s rousing, rumbustious, and a touch over the top with some of the campness. Quite why we needed four presumably tough Philadelphian gangsters mincing around was lost both in the mists of time and the swirling mists from ice machines at the side of the stage. But that’s show business dahlings!

Take me To Heaven is one of the show’s main numbers. It got us close as it provided the perfect high energy ending to ensure the show is an excellent lead up to all that is special about Christmas.

How lucky Malvern and Worcestershire is to have been able to host this feel-good show on its hugely successful UK tour which fully deserved its standing ovation.