Calendar Girls: The Musical review – heartfelt and hilarious, with nimbly handled nudity

One of the great qualities of Calendar Girls is its ordinariness. It takes place in a landscape of Morrisons supermarkets, hospital waiting rooms and traffic jams. The year is marked by carol concerts and cake competitions. Only here, in the fictional Yorkshire Dales village of Knapely, would Cheshire seem snooty and crazy paving seem outre.

Another great quality is its understanding of community. Sure, it makes fun of the jam-and-knitting conservatism of the Women’s Institute, but deep down it is wiser than that. For one thing, the middle-aged women who gather to hear such scintillating talks as Brenda Hulse’s lecture on broccoli are more like naughty schoolgirls than small-town reactionaries. For another, they have a radical instinct for collective action.

That is why it is a special thrill to see Paul Robinson’s superb production performed in the round, as it will be when it tours from Scarborough to Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake and Bolton Octagon (alas not when it reaches Ipswich, where the New Wolsey stage demands a more conventional audience relationship). In this staging, sparingly designed by Helen Coyston, there is no us and them, only a shared experience. When these women suffer grief, neglect and failure, we are right there with them. When they achieve the impossible, we are part of their joy.

Shared experience … (from left) Christina Meehan, Karen Holmes, Fenella Norman, Pippa Duffy and Alicia McKenzie in Calendar Girls: The Musical. Photograph: Tony Bartholomew

That they must do this by stripping naked with the audience on all sides presents a logistical challenge that they handle wittily, effortlessly – and to rapturous, body-positive applause. That they do it as actor-musicians, in the sparkling Gary Barlow and Tim Firth version, only adds extra levels of vulnerability and humanity, even if no scene is so sentimental that it cannot be offset by a cracking joke.

In an ensemble as gorgeous as this it feels invidious to single out Karen Holmes and Christina Meehan as Chris and Annie, the best friends whose scheme to commemorate Annie’s husband by undressing for a calendar is as celebratory as it is subversive. But their sisterly performances epitomise the production’s emotional openness, its understanding of the messiness of intimate relationships and its belief in the power of solidarity. They are first among equals in a deeply affecting show.

• At Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, until 25 July. On tour until 31 October.