News flash to anyone under 20: pretty women started fancying bad boys long before Kate Moss started lowering herself to the level of Pete Doherty. In fact, to believe Cry-Baby, a relentlessly striving show now running on Broadway, such unhealthy chemistry has been stirring since at least 1954, when this musical is set.

It is an era in America (in this case, Baltimore) when the polio vaccine has just arrived, and when that fact can be counterpointed by this show’s songwriters – David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger – with a number called “I’m Infected”, sung by the young lovers Allison and Cry-Baby. It’s not only passion that’s a virus here, but communism (Cry-Baby’s parents were executed for being pinkos) and rebellion of any kind.