Drop what you’re doing, put your prejudices aside, take a three-hour detour to a place where the news can’t get you.

Buy a ticket to Half A Sixpence at the Chichester Festival Theatre. It’s that simple.

For not only will you see an astonishing musical production sun-bursting with joy, you will be in on the birth of a star.

Review night saw three, count them three, standing ovations and trust me getting a Chichester audience out of its seat is some feat.

People of a certain age will remember the Tommy Steele film of the musical based on the HG Wells novel Mr Kipps.

Wells’ political polemic is largely stripped back in favour of a simple narrative about a poor lad with girlfriend, inheriting a fortune finding himself uncomfortably amid a venal upper class mainly only interested in his money before learning his lesson and returning to said girl.

So far so predictable. But this new Cameron Mackintosh version of Half A Sixpence adapted by Downton’s Julian Fellowes with added new music and lyrics by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe takes the musical to a higher plain.

And in young Charlie Stemp as Arthur Kipps the production has announced a revelation. All toothy grins, charm that ricochets around the auditorium, he is a note-perfect, fleet-footed marvel. All the more remarkable given that his previous credits are by far the smallest of the cast and appear to consist mainly of a smattering of chorus parts. He is just 22.

The rest of the assemble are fantastic too bringing out the sheer comic joy of the production in a series of rip-roaring set pieces. The class metaphor duel between Arthur’s banjo and would-be brother-in-law James Walshingham’s classical piano in the stifling drawing room of one our hero’s new found friends is an ingenious, hilarious way to end the first act.

And of course we are all waiting for Flash, Bang, Wallop in the second half . A Macintosh production isn’t going to let this runaway train of a belter underwhelm after building up so deliciously for the previous two hours.

Sure enough it is a wonderfully clever, stunningly choreographed tour de force which keeps rattling along unable to outstay its welcome. It’s impossible to suppress a grin almost as wide as Arthur’s.

Chichester Festival Theatre has a well deserved reputation for producing great traditional musicals that eschew the chintz of much of the West End, Lloyd Webber-style blockbusters. Now with Half A Sixpence it has taken the art form to a new high. And in young Charlie Stemp Sussex is in on the start of something special.

Half A Sixpence

★★★★★

Chichester Festival Theatre

Until September 3