CAROLINE New Wolsey, Ipswich and touring

A MUSICAL IS BORN…OUT OF POP”S PAST I liked this rackety, brassy, exhilarating banger of a show: a cartoonish bit of history, a jukebox musical with a heart of gold . It’s from an East Anglian touring consortium of five theatres with a feeling for their North Sea coast, celebrating the brief, glorious cheek of a 1960’s pirate station: Caroline, a battered ship anchored off the coast to beam all-day pop records to teenagers fed up, as the entrepreneurial founder said, with listening to Vera Lynn on the BBC Light Programme on Sunday afternoons. Its creator Vikki Stone builds it around a fictional couple, shopgirl Caroline shopgirl and Robbie, one of the first DJss (loosely based on Tony Blackburn). Haunting the record shop with bno money and hanging around with his mates, sharing chips and scuffles on the Clacton seafront, he is recrsuited by the entrepreneur Declan echoing the real Ronan O’Rahilly) and his chic partner, who sees the advertising potential of the station as more and more…