However, it is doubtful whether Winging My Way to the Top is ready to go any further without some rethinking.

It's not the first musical to use a story about show-business careers gone wrong, but that shouldn't matter if the approach is fresh and engaging.

Three middle-aged sisters, Beryl (Jill Walsh), Ruby (Karen Strahan) and Pearl (Lisa McClelland), used to be a group called the Diamond Sisters, but they never made it. Beryl has settled for domesticity with pine-furniture salesman Charlie Cheapside (Gordon Nicholson), Ruby has made a corporate marriage to pretentious and dodgy businessman Godfrey Goldsmith (John Kelly) and only Pearl is still trying unsuccessfully to follow the performing dream. The return of Phyllis (Gaye Reid), over the hill but still dancing, reignites the old ambitions.

At least that seems to be the line the piece is trying to follow, but the potential emotional energy of that story gets bogged down in some overexpanded sketch material concerning the celebration of Beryl and Charlie's 25th anniversary and a secondary plot involving Godfrey's dodgy business advice and a manipulative French maid (Angela Lount). There's an amount of floundering amid unfunny gags and stereotypes.

Strahan and Walsh not only wrote the book, music and lyrics, but also play two of the leading roles.

Nicholson is also on stage as Beryl's husband, but he is the director, the third one to work on the production. (Stephen Pike had to withdraw for health reasons and Sydney director Rodney Fisher pulled out because he reportedly considered the piece had dramaturgical problems.)

An enormous effort has clearly been put in to bring the piece to the stage, despite these difficulties, but there needs to be someone standing back and looking at how the show is working, and that's usually the director.

Late in the piece, there is a song, All I Have is Me, when Beryl, Ruby and Pearl and Phyllis take a moment out of the mayhem to reflect separately and collectively on their lives.

It's too late in the piece to help, but it's a good moment, with some intensity, that may point the way to deeper musical and dramatic possibilities in the play when the season is over and the script has been sitting in the writers' bottom drawer for a while.

Winging My Way to the Top. Book, music and lyrics by Karen Strahan and Jill Walsh. Directed by Gordon Nicholson. Musical Director John Black. Choreography by Michelle Heine. The Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre. Until May 17.