AUDIENCES couldn't help but have a whale of a time with the Congress Youth Theatre's production of Moby Dick The Musical.

A challenging musical to stage - the young, but talented cast, had no trouble rising to the riotous occasion.

Upon learning that their beloved school is facing bankruptcy the exuberant, and somewhat wayward pupils of St Godley's Academy for Young Ladies decide to stage a musical version of Moby Dick.

It is a wonderful subject matter, a play about a hard up school staging a musical play to save itself and it produced the funniest two hours I have seen in amateur youth theatre.

Essentially the cast took the role of schoolchildren, with the help of the caretaker, a couple of school inspectors and a few police officers, playing the roles of the characters of Moby Dick (to think about it too hard will give you a headache) and they coped admirably.

Special mention must go to Lewis Jenkins who was on top form as the headmistress who also played Captain Ahab.

He was superbly supported by Amy Griffiths as Ishmael, Laura Jordan Patrikios, as Pip, but it was the whole cast who shone in this show.

If anything I would say those in the audience who, like myself, had not brushed up on their Herman Melville before the performance, may have missed out on some of the comic references but that's no fault of the cast.

But there was one thing you could not mistake about this show and that was how much the youngsters themselves enjoyed performing it.