Even by the impressive standards expected of a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, their 1949 smash South Pacific is a pretty amazing show. It is packed with glorious, now familiar, songs — including Bali Ha’i, Younger than Springtime, Happy Talk and, of course, Some Enchanted Evening — and these for once arise quite naturally, utterly unforced, from the story being told. And what a story it is — a tale of love, against a background of war, and involving a clash of cultures on a sun-drenched island far away in the Pacific. Escapist it may be, yet it does not baulk at tackling head-on the American attitude to what used to be called ‘the colour bar’ — pretty impressive for its day.

Impressive too — mightily so — is the Lincoln Center Theater Production of the show which, having wowed audiences on Broadway and at London’s Barbican Centre, is now enjoying a near sell-out run at Milton Keynes Theatre (until October 22) before continuing on a tour that will bring it to Oxford’s New Theatre for Christmas.

Under director Bartlett Sher, musical director Jae Alexander, and set designer Michael Yeargan, the revival succeeds brilliantly in the areas that most matter. The strength in depth of the cast is demonstrated by the fact that in the matinee performance I saw this week, understudy Carly Anderson stepped so successfully into the star role of Ensign Nellie Forbush (for an indisposed Samantha Womack) that I was unaware of the substitution until I saw a notice in the interval. True, I had thought her voice a little more nasal than one might have expected of the leading lady.

The on-off romance between this pretty ‘hick from the sticks’ and the much older French plantation owner Emile De Becque (Jason Howard, in fine voice) makes for gripping viewing. Ditto that between Lt Joseph Cable (Daniel Koek, another superb singer) and the winsome local girl Liat (Elizabeth Chong). The latter’s sharp-operator mother (grass skirts or shrunken heads, anyone?) raises laughter as well as tears in the perfectly judged performance of Loretta Ables Sayre as Bloody Mary. Alex Ferns’s equally business-savvy Luther Billis is a big comic success, too. He comes across as especially Bilko-like in his dealings with the good-natured camp boss Captain Brackett, who is excellently portrayed by Nigel Williams.

With the Commander Harbison of Dominic Taylor, he has an important role to play in the plot involving Cable and Le Becque’s dangerous spying mission behind enemy lines. As handled here, this introduces taut drama into the piece, just as other aspects of American services life — including the “Thanksgiving Follies” show arranged by Nellie and Luther — give us some more of that welcome comedy.

As for eye-candy, plenty comes from the antics of the swim-suited bathing belles assembled to watch Nellie failing to “wash that man right outa my hair”. To even proceedings, bare bottoms are cheekily displayed — to whoops of glee from ladies in the audience — by a couple of the boys preceding her from the camp showers.

www.ambassadortickets.com/miltonkeynes or 0844 871 7652. South Pacific is at Oxford’s New Theatre from December 6 to 31 — 0844 871 3020. (www.newtheastreoxford.org.uk).