Not merely rocking the boat. Making it fly. Tickets for Nicholas Hytner’s production of Guys & Dolls will be the most sought after of the season. This 1950 musical (music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows) has everything. Dialogue and lyrics take off from Damon Runyon’s short stories, crackling and punching. The plot – hinging on collision and elision between card sharps and salvationists – is energetic, tender and shrewd. The musical numbers are nonstop sumptuous – in fact, such a glory roll that logjam can threaten: “showstopper” is not always a recommendation when the show must go on.
This staging never stops powering through. Fuelled by Bunny Christie’s design, Tom Brady’s musical supervision and choreography by Arlene Phillips with James Cousins, it swings up, down and sideways, enveloping the audience without ever dimming the dazzle of performance. In what is becoming a Bridge speciality, different scenes are staged on platforms that move around a standing audience of 420 (there are 600 sitting spectators). Paule Constable’s essential lighting and Christie’s design create a neonorama: scarlet caps and orange cursive, a luminous barber pole, a bendy, lime-green arrow. The Hot Box cabaret rises and sinks; across the way, Mindy’s deli glides into view; steam puffs up from the manhole through which gamblers slip into the sewers.
