After a triumphant (and mostly full house) run at the Edinburgh Fringe, The Black Blues Brothers are back on tour, and while this opening night in Coventry was far from sold out, the audience response was enough to suggest the show will be putting bums on seats across the country. Or perhaps bums on gym mats, as one of the five acrobats eschewed using hands or feet in favour of bouncing on his derriere during a fabulous rope-skipping routine.

That was one of a number of stunning sequences performed by the five Kenyan acrobats who make up the troupe, and while the show itself suffers from a clumsily disjointed narrative - four brothers should be cleaning up at a Cotton Club-style venue but get distracted by the music, much to the chagrin of their pantomime villain boss - the showstopping set pieces more than compensate.

The latter include Olympic-standard tumbling, jaw dropping balancing acts, dramatic human pyramids – which drew gasps from the audience when they appeared to collapse – and even playing with fire, which seemed especially hazardous given close proximity to the lengthy stage curtains.

The enthusiastic audience lapped it all up - even filling in the uncomfortable silences between routines with whoops and (what felt like awkward) laughs - and got even more engaged when some were invited on stage to become part of the act. The majority were children attempting to limbo, and while the show is generally family-friendly, I wasn’t the only one squirming in my seat during a striptease routine that got a bit too Chippendales for comfort. The 13-year-old accompanying me certainly wasn’t wolf-whistling like some of the women in the room - in fact she was looking away from the stage.

She also wasn’t impressed when one supposedly shy performer was bullied into taking his clothes off by his macho colleagues, and while the whole thing is obviously played for laughs, there’s an occasional sense of unease that undermines much of its charm.

None of this detracts from the performers’ extraordinary talents of course, and the dazzling acrobatics - much of which are accompanied by the soul sounds of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi’s hit musical comedy, in case you’re wondering where the title comes from - were genuinely worth getting off our bums for.

Three stars.

Reviewed by Steve Adams at Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on Thursday 1 September.