You might think that John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical Chicago wouldn’t be a top pick for a student audience or production company.

OK, it contains a healthy dose of cynicism, but isn’t a song and dance show set in the 1920s a bit wrinkly and uncool?

Forget such prejudices. A packed student-aged audi-ence filled Keble College’s O’Reilly Theatre at the mid-week matinée I attended, with student production company Fools & Kings setting the right mood from the outset: gone was the O’Reilly’s usual sterile lecture theatre ambience, replaced by the feel of a dimly lit, intimate nightclub (designer Barney Iley).

“Don’t you sweetheart me, you son of a bitch,” snaps Roxie Hart, who is in prison on remand for killing her lover. The object of her ire is fellow artiste Velma Kelly: she’s inside for murdering both her husband and her sister.

As Georgina Hellier and Josie Richardson made very clear in two splendidly in-your-face performances, Roxie and Velma are not to be messed with. They have no love for each other either, at least at the start, with the shorter Velma seeming to snap at Roxie’s heels like a small terrier with Rottweiler killer instincts. To play Roxie or Velma, you must also be a top-notch singer. Hellier and Richardson scored highly here too, with numbers All That Jazz and Funny Honey delivered with maximum impact. Also scoring highly in the acting/singing stakes was Andy Laithwaite, playing slimy lawyer Billy Flynn: All I Care About is Love he sings, while making it abundantly clear that he cares at least as much about his $5,000 fee. In support, there were strong cameos from Luke Rollason as Roxie’s overlooked husband — his soulful ballad Mr Cellophane was movingly delivered — and from Florence Brady as the bent prison matron.

But Chicago is nothing without a crack, raunchy chorus and a zappy band for numbers like Razzle Dazzle: the production came up trumps here too (director Jack Sain, choreographer Katherine Skingsley, musical director Ed Whitehead). This was a thoroughly entertaining antidote to a dreary November afternoon.