YOU can almost feel the British seaside rain in your face, the cloying taste of candy floss… and the flush of first love that’s never forgotten.

Yes, director Bill Kenwright’s Midas touch has once again turned a fairly predictable girl-meets-boy tale of holiday romance into a period classic set to an early 1960s rock ‘n’ roll score.

Nevertheless, despite a slick direction that hits the spot harder than a Chuck Berry guitar riff, it is without doubt the immortal music of Mort Shuman and Doc Pomus that holds the whole thing together.

Theirs was a song writing partnership made in Heaven. It was a collaboration that produced a constant stream of three-minute pop operas which superimposed the raunchiness of rhythm and blues on to what were essentially love poems… and then added a whole lot of sugar as well as shakin’ to the mix.

Every tune opens a creaking door to the past. Sweets for my Sweet, His Latest Flame, Little Sister, Lonely Avenue… this was the baby boomers’ soundtrack, the beat that quickened a million pulses and maybe broke or mended as many hearts, Romeo and Juliet set to a four-four beat.

Jason Denton and Elizabeth Carter do sterling work as star-crossed pair Curtis and Marie, ably supported by Blue star Antony Costa and Lola Saunders.

However, the story of their romance is really told most effectively by the songs, each one a hymn to the joys and pains of growing up in a relentlessly disapproving, parental world.

Save the Last Dance for Me – by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, the same team that created the hit Dreamboats and Petticoats - runs until Saturday (April 23) and is most definitely more of a jive rather than a stroll down this particular musical Memory Lane.