Rupert Christiansen - Daily Telegraph I don’t know whether it’s the effect of bleak middle age, the onslaught of Christmas or the general awfulness of the weather and everything on the news, but I found the sunlit innocence of Salad Days (which I’ve never seen or heard before) almost heartbreaking. Written in the mid-1950s, only a decade after we’d been ravaged by war, Dorothy Reynolds and Julian Slade’s skilfully crafted yet unfailingly modest little musical radiates youthful optimism and unsinkable niceness. Rebellion against an older generation isn’t the bitter and twisted business that it is in Osborne’s contemporary Look Back in Anger, but a simple matter of falling in love. Minnie the magic piano’s Dionysiac capacity to make everyone dance only helps the stuffed shirts loosen up a bit; nowadays it would start an apocalyptic omnisexual orgy. Even an invasion from outer space turns out to be benign. Where did the rot of cynicism set into our culture, and what good has it done us? Tete a Tete is best known as an opera group dedicated to experiment and novelty, but here it has lent itself to the even nobler cause of cheering us all up. This revival of Bill Bankes-Jones’ production, first seen at Riverside Studios last year, is just about pitch-perfect: it refuses to send the whole thing up or put a stylistic bomb under its fragile charm, yet never allows the whimsy to become too cloyingly saccharine. Much of its success is due to Tim Meacock’s resourceful designs, bright with primary colours but still full of sharply observed period detail. Accompanied by a combo of two pianos, drums and bass, the cast is first-rate throughout, and as a puritan in this matter, I took special pleasure in hearing words and lyrics of this sort cleanly delivered without recourse to phoney amplification. Sam Harrison and Katie Moore are very endearing as the dippy young lovers Tim and Jane, Rebecca Caine does a hilarious turn as languid Lady Raeburn and Kathyrn Martin puts across Asphynxia’s smoochy nightclub number with aplomb. The dancing, choreographed by Quinny Sacks, is terrific: I almost volunteered to join in myself. For my money, this has got to be the best musical in town: of course it’s only frothy nonsense, but the songs and the sentiments are just lovely, and you’d have to be very sneery or downright peculiar not to enjoy every minute of it.