‘I’ve been around so long I can remember Doris Day before she was a virgin.” The joke is generally attributed to Groucho Marx, but Adam Rolston’s script for his new musical A Sentimental Journey suggests that Doris has never regarded herself like that. “Sweet little Doris, that’s not me,” he has her saying. “Let me tell you I ain’t no saint.”

The sharp contrast between Doris’s cheery public image, and her private life is soberly documented by her son Terry (Ian McLarnon), acting as narrator. Rolston’s script commendably avoids both sensationalism and luvvie-speak, with Doris remarking simply and wistfully at one point: “All I’ve ever wanted is a happy marriage.” That’s about as sentimental as the story gets, so the title turns out to be a bit of a misnomer.

Some well-judged doses of humour also stop the show from becoming too sugary. There’s a splendid send-up of Doris riding into town in the sanitised western musical Calamity Jane. Both The Deadwood Stage and Secret Love are included from the film, as are 25 other Doris hits from across her career. All have been given vibrant, cabaret-style, arrangements – presumably by musical director and pianist Jo Stewart, who does a superb job throughout, along with Sebastian Guard (drums), Frazer Snell (bass), and Roger Wilson (saxes).

Under the direction of Alvin Rakoff, Tim Wallers, Carol Ball, and Glyn Kerslake enthusiastically play everything from Doris’s four disastrous husbands to the horses pulling the Calamity Jane stagecoach.

But all would be as nothing if it were not for Sally Hughes’s portrayal of Doris. As she told me in an Oxford Times interview (see Page 3), she has done a great deal of research into her jaunty delivery of the Doris numbers, and my goodness it shows. But why, oh why, has someone decided that she needs fuzzy amplification? It’s the only blot on a neat, fast-moving, and thoroughly satisfying show.

A Sentimental Journey continues at The Mill at Sonning until April 19. Box office: 0118 969 8000. Website: www.millatsonning.com