The Music Man by Queanbeyan Players is funny, tuneful and nostalgic

It is a wonder that Meredith Willson's clever and nostalgic show The Music Man seems to turn up only occasionally on the musical comedy circuit. It's a piece that teams with interesting songs and characters that require the company to do more than divide into male and female chorus. Director Joseph McGrail-Bateup and Queanbeyan Players clearly enjoy the challenge.

It's summer 1912, in River City, Iowa, where librarian and music teacher Marian (Deanna Gibbs) lives with her widowed mother Mrs Paroo (Janet Tweedie) and little brother Winthrop (Callum Doherty). The boy has become withdrawn since his father's death two years ago earlier and speaks little because of a lisp.

Enter con man "Professor" Harold Hill (Gordon Nicholson), with a scam involving the setting up of a boys' brass band. He is no music teacher, a fact quickly discovered by Marian even as she falls for him, but he knows how to sell the allure of shiny brass instruments and flashy uniforms to youngsters like Winthrop and their doting parents. Nicholson makes an engaging crook with a heart. He could afford to include the audience more directly but his performance makes clear the power of the Professor's saving grace, that he can make people believe in themselves. Gibbs partners him well as a Marian who sees right through the Professor but who also realises he genuinely helps people.

Some early musical uncertainties were quickly ironed out on opening night and by the end of the show she had beautifully established Marian's quiet force of character. The show's lighting design does not include follow spots but there's a real need for them (or occasional higher lighting levels) in the moments when she and the Professor sing, together or separately.

There are things to savour in this production, from the joyous sound of Zach Raffan's pit orchestra to the deft handling of the frequent intertwining of songs. The women of the chorus might be singing the gossipy Pickalittle but at the same time a barbershop quartet (Tristan Foon, Michael Jordan, David Leigh, Peter Smith) is doing Goodnight Ladies. And the magnificent Seventy-Six Trombones segues out of Marian's love song Goodnight My Someone so easily – same tune, different tempo. Clever writing and a production that relishes it.

There's Tweedie's richly Irish Mrs Paroo, willing her daughter toward the Professor and happiness, and the transformation of Doherty's grieving Winthrop into self confidence, via the song Gary Indiana, passed on to him by Hill because it contains none of the sounds that make him stumble. And it is only a brief moment but Katy Larkin makes some magic of young Amaryllis' burgeoning feelings for young Winthrop.

It's a quirky show full of humour and nostalgia for a time that probably never was but perhaps ought to have been. Queanbeyan Players have made a good choice.