After the formidable success of Cabaret and Flora the Red Menace in previous seasons, Dundee Rep confirms its status as Scotland’s first theatre of musicals with a mightily enjoyable staging of Gypsy, the Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim collaboration based on the life of the celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s the kind of vibrant, feelgood production that you would happily sit through twice.

Even if it were for strategic planning alone, you’d have to give James Brining’s production top marks. The biggest show the ensemble company has attempted features not only the regular in-house team supplemented by a handful of outside actors, but also any number of children and adult performers brought in via the Rep’s community and education department. All told, there are more than 30 people taking a bow to a standing ovation at the end of a thoroughly rewarding three-hour evening.

But it’s not just about numbers. The backstage musical, which follows the uncertain career of a family of child vaudeville performers, takes us on a whirlwind tour of dressing rooms, lodgings and all manner of stage sets, slipping from one to the next in rapid succession. The Dundee crew make the transitions of Neil Warmington’s set look effortless, but their work must be tireless.

Equally, the reason it’s so easy to warm to the Rep’s musicals is that they’re rich in the kind of humanity and individuality so typically absent from the overpolished West End shows that replicate themselves like viruses in the world’s big cities. Here we have a tight band of only six musicians and a team of actors who’ll already be in rehearsals for the next show in the season. Their success seems all the greater for the crazy ambition involved.

And they’re good. In such an ensemble effort, it feels invidious to single anyone out, but there’s no underestimating the achievement of Ann Louise Ross, as Mama Rose, the ultimate showbiz mother, and Emily Winter, as her daughter Louise, who becomes Gypsy Rose Lee.

They say Laurents, the librettist, was irritated by the tendency of Ethel Merman, the show’s original star, to tap her feet while singing. For all her power as a “fire alarm” vocalist, Merman was not in the first league of actors. Ross, by contrast, is a subtle performer and a mainstay of the Dundee company. She brings a stoic force to the role of a woman driven by an almost psychotic need for her children to succeed. It’s a desire that will never bring satisfaction, and her final solo, with the stage open to the back wall, all pretence stripped away, is hauntingly affecting. In place of Merman’s razzmatazz, Ross gives us a rounded, unsentimental portrait of a damaged human being.

Winter, meanwhile, has to take the show’s longest journey, from wallflower living in the shadow of her sister (Gail Watson is equally impressive as the precocious June) to brassy stripper finding emancipation in sexual exploitation. In this, Winter shows star quality all the way. Being a natural, unshowy performer with a tremendous singing voice, she shifts all the more convincingly from lowly sibling to elegant diva.

It’s true that the musical has an uneasy ambivalence about the nature of Gypsy’s profession and has to come to a swift stop before it all gets too seedy, but Brining lets the dark corners show through, at one point putting a huge mirror in front of us to remind us of our own voyeurism.

Elsewhere, he cleverly directs the child actors to give the impression of being a third-rate act — twirling batons, cartwheels, cheesy grins and all — even as they put their heart and soul into the performance. It’s a fine example of a company working with and for its own community and deserves to be seen and enjoyed widely.

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