IMAGINE This, a brand new musical which had its world premiere at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, this week, is a moving and poignant story with stunning songs and a slick and polished cast.

The heart-tugging musical revolves around a group of Jewish actors in the second world war living in a ghetto in Warsaw. Despite living in terrible conditions with no food they keep their hopes alive by performing the story of Masada at a theatre.

Masada, is the ancient Judean mountain where 2,000 years ago a band of 900 rebels held 10,000 Roman soldiers at bay, in a world not dissimilar to their own.While rehearsing the play, a young man from the resistance called Adam asks the family to hide him from the Nazis. Daniel Warshowskey,the man of the house, decides to help him and disguises him as one of the cast of Masada. As they perform the epic story, Adam and Daniel's daughter Rebecca come to realise that through death and destruction love can still thrive.

The musical is extremely clever in the sense that it draws many parallels from Masada to the family's own lives in 1942. But at times, due to the musical being a play within a play, it is a little confusing. Instead, it could have been more effective focusing the majority of its time on one of the eras, rather than flitting equally between the two. However, this musical is still extremely powerful. It could easily have been very depressing to watch but thankfully, due to confident direction from Timothy Sheader and comical writing in certain scenes, it really enhanced the overall production.

What makes Imagine This an inspiring piece of theatre is the songs. They truly come from the heart and are really hard-hitting. Well-established stage and screen actor Peter Polycarpou (Birds of a Feather) as Daniel really gave the song The Last Laugh his all and the beautiful love song I Surrender - sang by West End starlet Gina Beck and Stephen Ashfield - was a joy to hear.

This musical has all the elements to be at the top of its game, but it needs to really decide whether it's a story about Masada or the second world war to truly succeed.

Dawn Ellis.