You can dance up a storm, Guys

Strange how potent the best of the old Broadway musicals, like Guys And Dolls, remain! Michael Grandage's production draws little closer to low-life New York between the wars than an afternoon in the neighbourhood of Forties Piccadilly Circus.

The cast speak and sing in tongues that sound too close to England. Yet the lure of this comic-romantic fairy tale of mismatched lovers, who finally tumble into each other's uncertain arms, primarily depends upon the imperishable music and witty lyrics of Frank Loesser.

The book by Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling catches the sardonic lingo of Damon Runyon's stories of raffish Broadway loafers on which Guys And Dolls is based. It offers a matching attraction in comic cut and thrust.

The two romantic plots still run smoothly on parallel lines. Salvation Army girl Sarah sheds the veils of primness in a Havana bar to which Ewan McGregor's chronic gambler, Sky Masterson, has whisked her to win a crucial bet.

Douglas Hodge's blundering Nathan Detroit remains unwilling to advance to marriage from his 14-year-long engagement to Jane Krakowski's pathetically fantasising Miss Adelaide. The quartet are rare characters in a musicals' world. Each one is comic or quirky, eccentric and individuals.

Each, Miss Adelaide excepted, struggles to defeat romantic urges that possess them.

When it comes to Sit Down You're Rockin' The Boat, that command to people swinging in the wrong direction, or Luck Be A Lady, languidly sung by Ewan McGregor's charisma-free Sky Masterson as if he could manage nicely alone, you sense the first nighters exhilarated and intrigued by endearing, minor villains who live on wits, nerves and chance.

The admirable orchestra never drowns out the singers. Unfortunately, though, compared with Richard Eyre's vintage productions at the National, in 1982 and 1996, Grandage's version misses the boat. Designer Christopher Oram's set, with its vast neon-lit towers, is far too impersonal and grand.

Runyon's New York, as Eyre appreciated, was seedy, shady and small-scale. Grandage's hoods in their uniform dark suits and the Hot Box girls look too demure for their own bad. Oram does not even conjure up the romantic Cuban scene.

Only Rob Ashford's high octane choreographic setpieces capture the comedy, vivacity and repressed sexual ardour that ought be the key to Guys And Dolls. Havana, a late number in the first half, at last galvanises the show with the whole bar caught up in no end of hot, sexy dancing on the counter.

Jenna Russell's starchy Sarah comically abandons Salvation Army restraint and innocently turns to Bacardi, kicking her legs in the air. Down in the New York sewers where the hoods play their crap game unimpeded, they dance up an impressive storm too.