If a musical is successful in Canberra, it's a pretty fair bet the show will be produced again. The Musical of Musicals (the Musical!) was first produced in 2009 and had an encore season the following year.

Duncan Driver, who co-directed the previous production with Duncan Ley and narrates this one, says, ''It's a show we absolutely love doing - of all the things we've produced, it's probably the most fun.''

Driver says he and his fellow Everyman artistic directors - Ley and Jarrad West - asked the actors from the previous shows some time ago to keep the end of year free. Operating on the principle ''If it ain't broke, don't fix it'', Everyman is bringing the show back again with the same cast - for those who enjoyed it last time and for those who missed out to see what it's all about.

And what it's all about is musicals, not surprisingly. The off-Broadway MoM (as we'll call it), Driver says, parodies and satirises elements of musical theatre that some people - including him - think are foolish, over the top or otherwise strange. As such, he says, it can appeal both to people who hate musicals as well as people who love them.

The show tells one story five different ways, each a homage to a well-known writer or team in musical theatre. In each, the ingenue, June (played by Hannah Ley), cannot pay her rent to her evil landlord Jitter (West). Will her boyfriend Willy (Adrian Flor) and best friend Abby (Louiza Blomfield) help her?

In Corn!, the sentimental Rodgers and Hammerstein are the targets, with lampoons of shows such as Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music and The King and I. Stephen Sondheim's complex and musically sophisticated shows such as Company, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods are sent up in Into the Words. Dear Abby! sends up show-tune king Jerry Herman's Hello, Dolly!, La Cage Aux Folles and Mame. In Aspects of Juanita, the fabulously successful Andrew Lloyd Webber is taken on with references to Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Phantom of the Opera. And finally, Speakeasy is set in a Cabaret in Chicago to poke affectionate fun at the acerbic John Kander and Fred Ebb.

Driver says, ''There are moments in the Andrew Lloyd Webber one I laugh at every time - Jarrad's interpretation of a ''Phantom'' song is just breathtakingly funny. I love the music in the Stephen Sondheim one - for a parody of Stephen Sondheim it's particularly well done: the music and lyrics are brilliant to listen to - it's the one of the five, out of the hundreds of performances I've seen, I still find interesting to listen to - the others can get a bit repetitive.''

Driver says he is ''a fan of musical theatre in certain ways and shapes and forms''. Not surprisingly, he's a fan of Sondheim's shows, finding them more interesting and witty than many.

This new season of MoM will not be a carbon copy of the earlier production, he says.

''We're going to tweak little bits, a little bit of the choreography, and some of the in-jokes have changed - we had jokes about what was going on in Canberra theatre in 2009 and that's different now, so the jokes have been updated.''