Kwame Kwei-Armah opens his first season at the artistic helm of the Young Vic with a staging of his and Shaina Taub’s musical adaptation of Twelfth Night, first seen in New York’s Central Park in 2016 and revived there this summer. It’s an all-singing, all-dancing, all-capering non-stop fun-fest. But I used exactly those words to describe Emma Rice’s version at Shakespeare’s Globe less than eighteen months ago, which I regarded as a sorry failure. What’s so different about this one?

First and most importantly, it understands Shakespeare. It may cut the text severely, some might say brutally, to accommodate the songs and pare the action down to 90 uninterrupted minutes, but what remains demonstrates an awareness and appreciation of the spirit of the playwright’s festive comedies. Literally festive, in this case: I gazed at Robert Jones’ set resembling a parti-coloured Notting Dale street, with flags of all nations hung across it as bunting, and failed to twig that the play is in effect set on the eve of the Notting Hill Carnival.

This is to some extent a pretext for the inclusiveness of using an exuberant community chorus of some 30 people, but it also jibes with the sense of a licensed period of misrule which permeates Shakespeare’s finest comedies. Rather than the reggae of Carnival, Taub’s songs tend toward perfectly crafted pop/soul 1970s Americana; the arrangements make much of the Pianet, that slightly muffled-sounding keyboard much beloved of Stevie Wonder during that period. Melissa Allan as Feste is the commère of the musical side of things, trundling around what looks like a small karaoke amp on a trolley.

The shadows of the original play have been almost entirely banished; there is little ambivalence in Feste’s character, and the malice of the deception of arrogant Malvolio never draws blood. Once again, this is forgivable. Gerard Carey’s Malvolio is a magnificent sourpuss creation, topped off with a neatly-trimmed ’tache and changing for the “yellow stockings” bit into lurid cyclist’s Lycra. It would take a heart of stone to remain undelighted by a production number like “Count Malvolio”, and Carey somehow manages to pivot superciliously even when riding a Segway.

The broader Shakespearean comedy is a little underpowered: Martyn Ellis never really gets to stretch out and rollick as Toby Belch, constantly retiring to the Duke of Illyria pub along with Silas Wyatt-Barke’s sideways-baseball-capped Andrew Aguecheek. The jollity is mostly elsewhere. The combination of Taub’s songs (such as the glorious trio “Is This Not Love?”) and Kwei-Armah and NY Public Theater supremo Oskar Eustis’ direction makes even the tension in the central love triangle between Orsino, Olivia, and Viola disguised as Cesario more enjoyable than suspenseful.

Kwei-Armah has come off the starting blocks showing his desire to make the Young Vic a place of diversity and accessibility. In other hands this would be box-ticking, but when it’s executed with such flair, intelligence and vitality, even a ticked box becomes a thing of beauty.

Written for the Financial Times.