Guys and Dolls

What's not to like about Guys and Dolls? You get a fine-tuned script popping with one-liners. You get a bunch of Broadway's best songs. You get dance routines as spectacular as the Manhattan skyline. And you get a cast mixing musical theatre's finest exponents (Marina Prior, Ian Stenlake) with stage-adept TV stars (Lisa McCune, Magda Szubanski, Garry McDonald and Shane 'Kenny' Jacobson). The production comes to town after a lengthy Melbourne season, in a version originally staged to great acclaim by London's Donmar Warehouse. Luck be a lady tonight? Luck has nothing to do with it. They've loaded the dice - this is Sydney's surest bet for a good night out since they repealed the six o'clock swill.

The 1950 musical by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, based on stories by Damon Runyan, offers a street-level assessment of the battle of the sexes. Nathan Detroit (McDonald), who runs "the oldest established, permanent, floating crap game in New York", sees marriage as a sucker bet and has been engaged for 14 years to frustrated burlesque singer Miss Adelaide (Prior). Womaniser and high-rolling gambler Sky Masterson (Stenlake), meanwhile, has never been in love, until Detroit bets him a thousand bucks he can't get Save-a-Soul Missionary Sarah Bown (McCune) to go to Havana with him. Masterson convinces the virginal evangelist to get on the plane with the promise that he'll bring 12 genuine sinners to her next prayer meeting; but, once he gets her to Cuba, falls for her faster than Sarah falls for the sensual pleasures of Bacardi cocktails and salsa dancing.

In this show, it's the dolls who make the biggest impression. Nobody plays sexual repression like Ms McCune, and the extended Havana nightclub scene has Australia's sweetheart first resisting her urges, then drunkenly trying to keep it together on the dance floor before starting a brawl over Stenlake with a local chica. Meanwhile, over at that New York club with the vaguely pornographic name 'The Hot Box', Prior's Adelaide is bringing down the house with her saucy numbers 'A Barrel and a Peck' and 'Take Back Your Mink' - the latter climaxing in striptease. And while Szubanski, cross-dressed as roly-poly gangster Big Jule, doesn't get a song to herself, she's a hoot - a greedy child in a three-piece suit.

If you have memories of being underwhelmed by the plodding 1955 movie - Marlon Brando struggling to hold a tune, Frank Sinatra trying not-so-hard to come across as a Jewish nogoodnik - then banish them. Stenlake and McDonald may not be movie legends, but they're much, much better in these roles. And while Jacobson as Nicely Nicely Johnson is not quite a Stubby Kaye, the staging of his signature tune, 'Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat', leaves the movie for dead. It's a real showstopper. This Guys and Dolls is a fast-paced, funny and thrillingly choreographed romp. So sue me - I loved it. Nick Dent