If you like Eastenders then you will love Blood Brothers. At a certain point some booming drumbeats even sounded almost like those iconic opening bars in the theme tune to the (disputably) best British soap opera. Family matters and excessive emotion, 2 ingredients in any soap opera, are the bare bones of Blood Brothers: a play in which family matters will make you feel excessive emotions.

So often touring musicals can lose some of their magic because they have to downsize sets and cost-cut on special effects like lighting or pyro-technics so as to be able to tour affordably. Blood Brothers is perfect for touring though, because the plain, suitably dour set doesn't really matter to us all that much and the magic really comes from the writing, something which can be taken all over the world without any edits needing to be made. Willy Russell's writing is what forms the characters and binds them to their fate. It is what makes our eyes well up and sends shivers down our spine throughout the first act and then by the end tips us, and the accumulation of salty waters in our eyes, over the edge.

The writing does not only create the comedy and drama, it also includes lots of entertaining rhyming verse, obviously in the songs, but also some of which is spoken too. Mickey's monologue I Wish I Was Our Sammy and the Narrator's spoken Summer Sequence are both standalone poems within the lyricism Blood Brothers delights with. Delight comes on a double-edged sword with the tragedy being what ultimately makes Blood Brothers memorable and affecting.

A couple of casting choices seemed ill fitting, or perhaps just lazy. Mrs Lyons, played by Tracy Spencer, was more witchy and hysterical than she need be played. With her sleek, black hair and pale face from which broke her piercing shrieks, she came across a little over the top compared to Maureen Nolan's more muted Mrs Johnston. Edward Lyons was also strangely cast with Mark Hutchinson appearing far too old for the final age his character reaches in the play. If you won an award playing a young man in 1993 you probably shouldn't still be playing the exact same young man 20 years on. A bit of fresh blood might be needed for this brother. Sean Jones, as cheeky chap Mickey, got away with being too old for his role though. He had great physicality and was wonderfully comical as the young Mickey. Jones also did a great job of Mickey's difficult transition to adulthood. It is by far the most drastic character transformation and was well done, gradually and subtly.

Something I particularly like about Blood Brothers is the repetition and reprise of music. The tunes are very melodic and the familiarity of a returning harmony is comforting. It also seems makes the lyrics more accessible as you become used to the rhythms and rhymes.

Big musicals nowadays (particularly those on clunky national tours) can sometimes feel quite stale and archaic; they end up being mere presentations of song and dance, which involve admirable and exceptional skills but don't ring true any more. Thankfully, Blood Brothers doesn't feel outdated yet. And long may stay it so, the standing ovation said as much.

"I love the bones of ‘im" is a special phrase in my house. It tends to come out when my mum and my aunt have had a few glasses of wine at Christmas and get nostalgic for a simpler, Scousier time in their lives. Hearing it in pretty well the first scene of Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers was a sign of things to come, really, the scene set firmly on Merseyside for this classic tale of nature vs nurture.

The New Theatre is a daunting odeon to fill, almost cavernous in its height, yet the set filled the space on stage amply, as the voices and energy of the cast filled the space beyond the orchestra pit. In its way Blood Brothers is an odd type of musical, where the best of the singing is had by two key, but peripheral characters, almost lightening the load on the three main characters to deal with the not inconsiderable task of growing 20 years in a few hours.

The five in question – The Narrator (Warwick Evans), a menacing suit, part malevolent bouncer, part conscience; Mrs Johnstone (Maureen Nolan), the unfortunate mother who gives up one of her twins to her employer; the twins, Mickey and Eddie (Sean Jones & Mark Hutchinson) and their childhood best friend/adolescent love interest Linda (Olivia Sloyan); all do a fantastic job with those lots. The bouncing, unbridled energy from the twins as kids turning into harrowing reality of adulthood is wonderful to behold, and Maureen Nolan (one of the four Nolans to play the role of Mrs Johnstone in their time), the put upon mother of eight, sets the scene well, being a sort of Catelyn Stark with an honest to god voice and a half. Evans’s almost ever-present darkness and strength of voice, is the play’s backbone, harmonising where needed, setting scenes and masking scene changes with admirable regularity. It should also be said that Olivia Sloyan does a great deal as Linda, with less singing and much less stage time, she manages to go to the same depths as the eponymous brothers.

In fact, the only detractors from the entire thing were to do with the sound. We were neither too close nor too far from the stage, but there were several occasions where the actors’ mikes were overpowered by the orchestra, and some dubious overuse of echoes and other sound effects did little to add to the stellar vocal work going on on stage.

Having said that, I loved the bones of it.