Jeezus the Musical @ New Diorama Theatre, Euston

Jeezus the Musical, the irreverent, semi-autobiographical creation now blessing the New Diorama Theatre, Euston performs the loaves-and-fishes trick of turning a small stage into a vessel brimming with joy. It tells the story of young Jesús, a pious, hormonally supercharged altar boy with a spectacular crush on history's most famous six-packed saviour, crashing headlong into a military father who views this particular vocation with considerably less divine approval. Woven beneath the saucy comedy are shadows: Peru's dictatorship, nightly curfews, colonisation, revolution, the grimy legacy of clerical abuse. The show knows where the abyss is. It just prefers to twerk on the edge of it. It sashays, brazenly and without apology, between the full gothic weight of centuries of religious oppression and a really excellent bum joke, sometimes within the same breath, occasionally within the same hip thrust. That this constitutes a coherent theatrical experience is, darling, the evening's opening miracle, and by no means the last.

Those heavy themes are touched, singed briefly like a liturgical candle held to an altar cloth, then bounced firmly back toward sequins. The production returns, again and again, to an affectionate, even slightly reverent, relationship with the Catholic aesthetic it is nominally skewering. The cross remains, lovingly lit. But underneath all the flamboyant cabaret numbers beats a sweet, soppy message about queer love winning through, and the audience, bless every one of their miraculous souls, received this gospel with pentecostal enthusiasm.

Much of this is down to the magnetic alchemy of the two performers and creators, Sergio Maggiolo & Guido García clad in the purple and white of South American Catholicism that lets the iconography do some heavy lifting while the performers get on with being delightful. Their chemistry is authentic in a way that can't be manufactured: this is their show, story, and blasphemy, and they inhabit it with the radiant, unguarded pride of people who have created something genuinely personal. Their performances lean fully, magnificently into melodrama, the camp occasionally teeters toward critical mass, but that excess is the joke, a knowing wink at the genre that gives the show so much of its outrageous, irresistible charm.

Neither have huge ringing voices, but here is the sacred truth of live theatre: authenticity will always, always perform a miracle that mere technique can't. The fervour, the comic timing, and the sheer glee with which Maggiolo and Garcia sing their own material, material they clearly believe in with something approaching doctrinal conviction is genuinely infectious. Their central comic-theological thesis, delivered with a tongue placed so firmly in cheek it risks permanent relocation, draws on the observable facts: that according to Catholic teaching, Jesus spent his earthly time surrounded by devoted men who adored him, and that on most crucifixes he is ripped. Their conclusion: that's pretty gay.

Garcia's musical direction keeps the whole blessed thing buoyant with Tom Cagnoni's playing of Latin rhythms, playful melodies and musical interludes, all of it perfectly calibrated to the show's register of knowing, high-spirited camp. Director Laura Killeen keeps the whole thing tight and delivered in 69 minutes.

Did I, personally, experience full beatification? I must confess that I arrived at the New Diorama hoping for something a little more incendiary. A savage, structurally fearless satire about growing up queer as an indigenous Peruvian after centuries of colonial violence, Catholic oppression, and institutional corruption, all delivered with tremendous jokes and irresistible tunes. I received the jokes. I received the tunes. The savage structural reckoning, however, was, like the Second Coming, deferred for a later occasion. Whether there is a quietly iconoclastic fury lodged inside these two, waiting to be unleashed in a future, less charming, more devastating show. I earnestly hope so, and would encourage their campy iconoclasm tenfold. But my own private expectations are, frankly, irrelevant to the review of the show that actually exists, and the show that actually exists is warm, joyful, exquisitely performed, and thoroughly delightful. They charm you from the first moment. Full octane joyous silly daft campery, with a tiny purple cape and glass beaded nipple tassels and they do not let go.

Bonus miracle: After the show, the congregation was treated to tamales from Con Pasión Perú, the wonderful Peruvian cooperative founded by Joana Rossi Cardenas. Deeply worth seeking out, very much worth eating. A fitting communion, and further proof that Peru's gifts to this world are manifold and delicious.

Jeezus is running through 9th May, full details here: