Five stars for a high-energy, finger-snapping Guys & Dolls

Guys & Dolls

Bridge Theatre, London

There’s surely been a run on zoot suits and braces across London outfitters recently, as two major musicals about gamblers, gangsters and gals roll into the West End.

At the Garrick, Bonnie & Clyde takes a crack at the short, shocking lives of the infamous lovers. But first to the Bridge and Nicholas Hytner’s sensational revival of Guys & Dolls. This is one to bet your shirt on: a superb production, hot as mustard, sweet as pie.

Hytner stages the beloved 1950 musical by Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling in the round and semi-promenade, steeping the audience in the fabled, seething New York of Damon Runyan’s 1930s stories, where Nathan Detroit and his small-time gamblers come up against Sarah Brown and the Save-a-Soul mission. You can join the saints, and look down on the action from the seats, or get down with the sinners and stand in the pit, where hydraulic stages rise up through the crowd, giving you a sewer rat’s-eye view of events.

The action, like Nathan’s illegal crap game, scurries from location to location, as cops, missionaries, showgirls and sweaty, panicked gamblers suddenly pop up on platforms mid-crowd, while ushers dressed as (phenomenally polite) NYPD officers marshal spectators out of the way. Bunny Christie’s canny design conjures the bustle of NYC with the lightest of touches: a fire hydrant here, a steaming manhole there.

Despite this fiendish technical jigsaw, Hytner and his team tell the story with neon crackle, finger-snapping pace and more sauce than Mindy’s Diner. Nathan, short on dough and out of venues, is under pressure to get those dice rolling because “Big Jule” is in town: a man whose stature, in Cameron Johnson’s formidable performance, comes matched to a voice that rumbles more ominously than the New York subway. So Nathan bets inveterate gambler Sky Masterson — a guy who can’t tie his shoes without making a wager — that he won’t get pretty, pious Sarah Brown on a date to Havana. But as Nathan’s own long-suffering fiancée (14 years engaged and counting) tells him, betting against the human heart is a fool’s game.

The staging embraces the musical’s stadium status — who doesn’t want to sway along to those legendary numbers? — and the choreography, by Arlene Phillips and James Cousins, is a miracle of high energy in compact spaces (rock the boat too much here and you’ll wind up pitching into the sea of spectators). But what’s wonderful about Hytner’s production is that, amid all the pizzazz, the affectionate humanity and tenderness of the piece come out. There’s a longing at its centre, not unlike a Shakespearean comedy. The huge irony is that Sky and Nathan, sharp as diamonds and capricious as dice, are scared to gamble their hearts.

Beautifully pitched central performances tease out the tensions between the characters’ public profiles and private fears. Daniel Mays’ Nathan is a thoroughly loveable loser, smoothing down his crumpled suit and rumpled clients with practised resolve, but driven into wild-eyed panic at the sight of a wedding bouquet. Andrew Richardson’s suave, charismatic Sky is no better: after putting his smooth moves on Sarah to win his bet, he visibly reels at the realisation that he has fallen in love.

In the “dolls”’ corner you have Celinde Schoenmaker’s Sarah, whose soaring, pure voice and prim elegance seem to mark her out for heaven — until she discovers sex and booze. Two Bacardis in and she’s shimmying recklessly and biffing anyone who dances with Sky. And the show-stealer is Marisha Wallace’s Miss Adelaide, “the well-known fiancée”, whose raunchy routines at the Hot Box conceal a deep-seated yearning for apple-pie domesticity. Wallace is terrific: sensually seductive in “Take Back Your Mink”; sweetly longing in “Adelaide’s Lament”. She’s no ditsy broad, but a real woman in love.

Around them a fizzing, comically precise ensemble and Tom Brady’s great band relish classics such as “Luck Be a Lady” and “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat”. Hytner dials up and diversifies the desire that so inconveniently messes with pure thoughts: the suggestive carrot choreography in “A Bushel and a Peck” tests the poker face of many a spectator while a hot, all-male dance number in Cuba hints that there may be more to Sky’s evasiveness than meets the eye. Unlike Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma!, this is not a revisionist staging: it won’t rock the boat. But boy, it’s a winner.

★★★★★

To September 2, bridgetheatre.co.uk

Bonnie & Clyde

Garrick Theatre, London

From a musical fable of Broadway to a musical about a couple who wanted to become a fable. Bonnie & Clyde is an altogether darker story: Nathan and his buddies shoot dice; Clyde shoots people.

Accordingly, this 2009 musical, by Ivan Menchell with music by Frank Wildhorn and lyrics by Don Black, deploys plenty of pep but more too in the way of psychology, foregrounding the grinding poverty of Depression-era America, and the driving desires of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow for something different. The difficulty, however, is that it never moves much beyond stating that, and doesn’t explore their thinking with any nuance. Nor does it grapple with the grim reality of them killing 13 people. And so we end up with something snappy, gorgeously performed, but essentially superficial.

Early scenes sketch out the grim, exhausting poverty from which the couple came and we see the young Bonnie and Clyde daydreaming of escape. She fantasises about being a movie star like Clara Bow; his outlaw idols are a little less wholesome.

But both yearn for excitement and fame, so when they meet, they form a fatal compound. As others queue at a soup kitchen under a poster promising the American dream, or bend the knee at church, the young couple are stealing cars, robbing stores and making hay. “We won’t get to heaven, so let’s raise a little hell,” sings Clyde in a stomping rock number.

As in Guys & Dolls, pushback against all this no-good behaviour comes in the shape of the church, with Clyde’s hairdresser sister-in-law Blanche (Jodie Steele) combining faith and feminine wiles to persuade her man, Clyde’s brother, to give up his criminal ways. Steele, and her fellow hairstylists, have one of the show’s best numbers “You’re Goin’ Back to Jail”, which they deliver with teasing panache in Nick Winston’s vibrant production.

As the eponymous criminals, Frances Mayli McCann and Jordan Luke Gage have masses of charisma, together with great voices: McCann gives a spellbinding rendition of her sweetly seductive solo “How ’Bout a Dance?”. They make you feel keenly the youth of the pair. But they are underserved by a script that reduces serious issues and violent killings to fleeting moments: Clyde has the briefest hesitation after shooting his first cop but shrugs it off; Bonnie sings “Dyin’ Ain’t So Bad”. You’re 23, babe. It is. There’s so much talent here, but sadly it gets lost on the road.

★★☆☆☆

To May 20, bonnieandclydemusical.com