What’s in a yellow dress? Hope over experience? Reckless confidence? This is a legitimate question when the second big cross-Atlantic people-pleaser hoves into view featuring a girl in a frock of striking daffodil hue. It doesn’t take a degree in semiotics to translate this. Forget the bad stuff, people. C’mon, get happy.

Judy Collins was one of the great folk icons of the 1960s, competing for the spotlight with Joan Baez. Where the latter was instrumental in bringing Bob Dylan to wide prominence, the former was crucial in putting Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen on the musical map. She was first to record their music – on Wildflowers (1967), a seminal collection arranged by Joshua Rifkin, celebrated scholar of Bach, Beatles and Scott Joplin.

Richard Harris's award-winning comedy about a group of seven women and one man who attend a weekly tap-dancing class in a dingy north London church hall ran for three years from 1984 in the West End, from where it went to Broadway.

This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot.

Why? That's the abiding question that hangs over The Girls, the sluggish and entirely pro forma Tim Firth-Gary Barlow musical that goes where Firth's film and stage play of Calendar Girls have already led. Telling of a charitable impulse that succeeded beyond all expectations, the real-life scenario makes for heartening fare in our seemingly heartless times.

The Other Palace’s housewarming party certainly lives up to its billing as a wild one – wet and wild, in fact, as the first three rows are sporadically doused with bathtub gin. The theatre formerly known as St James, revamped by purchaser Andrew Lloyd Webber as a breeding ground for musicals, opens with the UK premiere of an established show: Michael John LaChiusa and George C.

Eureka’s restored print of Charles Vidor’s 1944 musical Cover Girl looks and sounds astonishingly vivid, especially when watched on Blu-ray. Would that everything were so simple: despite a starry creative team, the film makes for frustrating viewing. Doubly so when you consider that this was one of Jerome Kern’s final scores, with lyrics provided by Ira Gershwin which are the film’s one constant pleasure: couplets like “Because of Axis trickery/My coffee now is chicory” are peerless, especially when delivered in brash style by a young Phil Silvers.

Gene Kelly plays Danny McGuire, injured in combat and reduced to running a Brooklyn nightclub, whose star dancer Rusty Parker (Rita Hayworth) becomes an overnight sensation after appearing on a magazine cover. Despite McGuire’s love, she takes up a wealthy producer’s offer to swap Brooklyn for Broadway, agreeing to marry him along the way. The eventual happy ending won’t surprise anyone, but there’s an awful lot of chaff to get through en route, notably an interminable series of flashbacks where Hayworth plays her own grandmother. Including an absolutely terrible faux-cockney number, the dubbed Hayworth’s stilted performance making Dick Van Dyke’s unfairly-maligned turn in Mary Poppins seem like Stanislavsky method acting.

Still, the high spots are terrific. “Make Way for Tomorrow” begins with Kelly, Hayworth and Silvers in a quayside oyster bar, swiftly skipping outside for a superb extended dance sequence on a huge soundstage, encountering drunks, milkmen and a baton-twirling policeman. Kelly had been given free reign as choreographer, the scene's glories hinting at Singin’ in the Rain’s title number. And the passage where he tap dances with his own translucent reflection is eye-popping. Eve Arden’s sardonic PA gets many of the best lines, and the extravagant title song showcases Hayworth’s background as a dancer, her Rusty stepping out of a cloud before shimmying seductively down an improbably long ramp.

Production design is exquisite, from the fashion magazine’s gleaming art-deco office to the nightclub’s cramped kitchen and dressing-rooms. Vidor’s vibrant deployment of primary-coloured costumes anticipates both Jacques Demy and La La Land. Hayworth, Kelly and Silvers are always watchable. But slack pacing and a curiously unmemorable score mean that Cover Girl hasn’t aged well. Disc presentation, however, is excellent: there’s a brief appreciation from Baz Luhrmann and Farran Smith Nehme’s booklet essay is a pleasure to read.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cover Girl

“I’m Death.” “And you’re on holiday?” Well, there’s really no way to disguise the preposterousness of this musical’s premise, nor to reconcile its winking humour and self-serious grand romance. Thus, Thom Southerland’s London premiere wisely diverts attention to its seductive qualities as a stylish period piece – come for the flappers, champers, saucy maids and misty Italian arches.

La La Land needs no further introduction. A homage to the golden age of the movie musical, to Michel Legrand and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it contains perhaps the catchiest score to come out of Hollywood in many years.

"Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day!" Curly the cowboy sang in the opening scene of Oklahoma!, the first musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943). In the midst of war here was sheer optimism and celebration set – with some nods at reality ("there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, an’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up the sky") – in the American West.