Here’s a jukebox musical import from Australia with a serious difference, and not just in its title. Instead of the camp story of pop backstage politics that informed the Pet Shop Boys’ own flirtation with creating an original piece of musical theatre when they produced the ill-fated Closer to Heaven, this show takes their electronic pop repertoire and makes something brand-new and freshly powerful out of an already existing body of songs, though not all are familiar.

That stretches to both their sound and meaning. The songs are distilled into new orchestral settings, and with musical director Dean Lotherington leading a five-piece combo of piano and strings (violin, viola, cello and bass), the songs are re-orchestrated to bring dramatic fresh colours to this new musical palette. A stonking quintet of sensational singers (three men, two women) also replaces the heavily processed nasal whine of Neil Tennant to make you listen anew to the words, too.

This phenomenally rich and evocative series of pop poems of contemporary life and relationships duly come up sounding even better than in their originals. And director David Knox, who also conceived the production, provides a delicately-woven but not overly intrusive through line to keep a series of onstage relationships alternately boiling with human emotion and behaviour, from doubt to desolation and all shades inbetween.

The result is a rich and rare thing: a genuine ‘art’ musical that could also be said to be a piece of pop art. It’s the best show of its kind since Twyla Tharp wove a dance drama out of Billy Joel’s repertoire in Movin’ Out: a show that is as challenging as it is captivating.