The new Australian musical Ladies in Black proved to be a winner for a packed audience on opening night. Adapted from Madeleine St John's novel The Women in Black, it taps into 1950s Sydney and the stories of the women who work in the fictional F.G.Goodes department store. Echoes of the glamour of the old David Jones, Mark Foys and Anthony Hordern and Sons abound.

But the show's quiet appeal also lies in the exploration of the social history of the times.

Young Lesley Miles (Sarah Morrison) arrives fresh from finishing the Leaving Certificate to take on a holiday job among the women who work in the glamorous dress department. She is a dreamy, clever kid who has rebranded herself as Lisa (her parents might have something to say about that) and has some ambition to be a poet. Certainly she wants to go on to uni, despite the views of her father (Greg Stone) about the need for women to have an education.

Up among the dresses, however, her understanding of people and life is broadened as she becomes used to the work and the staff during the pre-Christmas rush. Gradually the stories emerge. Fay (Ellen Simpson) has a real fear of never finding a secure relationship. Patty (Madeleine Jones) is in a childless marriage with the unresponsive and repressed Frank (Tamlyn Henderson). Ageing Miss Jacobs (a magical and moving Trisha Noble) has long ago lost her potential partner to war.

But it's sophisticated European Magda (Natalie Gamsu) who breaks Lisa out of her dreamy shell and teaches her how to dress, how life and love are to be enjoyed, and how dreams can be pursued.

Gabriela Tylesova's designs capture the shapes and silhouettes of pre-miniskirt fashion very well, although theatrical licence happily leads to a brighter palette than I remember. And there's Lisa's mother (Carita Farrer Spencer in a gently well-observed performance) standing her daughter on a chair to hem the home-made versions.

Tim Finn's songs and music are mostly agreeable, if not altogether memorable. Notable numbers include I Danced with a Continental, where Simpson's despairing Fay discovers the joys of multiculturalism, and anything involving the three life-loving Hungarians, Gamsu's life-affirming Magda, her husband Stefan (Stone again) and charming new arrival Rudy (Bobby Fox). But it's Bastard Song, where some of the women discourse on the worst male behaviours they have seen, that really catches something of the Anglo-Celtic Australian verbal talent for the dry and the dismal.

It's those authentic voices that make for a warm audience response. The first half might seem a little too long, but the resolutions are swift and satisfying in the second half. And the large cast do a magnificent job. Ladies in Black is a show that deserves to be packed out by those who want to understand about the past and those who want to remember.