GUYS AND DOLLS

One of the greatest musicals written, Guys And Dolls (1950), currently at the Chichester Festival Theatre, still oozes class. The film featured Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, but it’s as a stage show that it retains its comic blend of religion, gambling and low-life glamour.

Frank Loesser, who wrote both music and lyrics, based it on the stories of Damon Runyon, that rare creature, a writer who became an adjective, Runyonesque. The show is a parade of hatted-and-spatted sidewalk hustlers and crapshooters. They all shimmy as they should and Sophie Thompson is the evening’s outstanding performance, a kooky delight as Miss Adelaide, the romantic Hot Box stripper who Nathan Detroit – a nicely harassed Peter Polycarpou – has kept dangling for 14 years with the promise of marriage. She’s got a permanent cold from a virus called disappointment.

Sky Masterson is the betting pro who picks up Nathan’s bet that he won’t be able to persuade the stiff Salvation Army sergeant, Sarah Brown, for a night in Havana. Jamie Parker gives Sky a nicely reserved edge. He and Sarah make it to Cuba where star choreographer – Carlos Acosta – has a chorus leaping about like demented gazelles in a syncopated, Bacardi-fuelled nightclub fiesta. Clare Foster’s Sarah is particularly good when getting unintentionally drunk – ‘If I were a bell, I’d be ringing’ – and the pair duet exquisitely in I’ve Never Been In Love Before, a number delivered with intimacy.

The show reminds us that this is a musical comedy that’s actually funny. Partly it’s to do with the way these New York characters who say ‘dese’, ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ are given to very courtly phrase-making, as in my favourite line – ‘Take back your mink, to from whence it came.’

The gambling fraternity – Harry the Horse, Nicely-Nicely Johnson – are cartoonish where a spot more realism is required. Nobody in this show is threatening, not even Big Jule who plays with blank dice: ‘I had the numbers taken off for luck but I remember where the spots formerly were.’

The quality of the musical is self-evident in Gordon Greenberg’s production, staged beneath a glittering arc of post-war ads and Broadway lights. The designs (by Peter McKintosh) whisk us from Cuba to a mission hall where Sky gets the crapshooting fraternity to fi nally confess their sins (it’s a cash deal).

There’s a parade of showstoppers – Guys And Dolls, Luck Be A Lady – in an evening that’s both electric and elating.

Until 21 September at Chichester Festival Theatre, Oaklands Park, Chichester: 01243-781312, www.cft.org.uk