‘Guys and Dolls’ Review: An Explosively Thrilling Production of a Masterpiece in London
David Benedict Since Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre, is one of the finest, most detailed Shakespeare directors in the land, you could be forgiven for forgetting that he really knows how to put on a show — and then some. Given that his career spans everything from “One Man, Two Guvnors” to the original “Miss Saigon,” expectations in London were high that, armed with arguably the greatest musical comedy ever written, he might be onto a winner. Revise your expectations: His immersive, explosively joyous “Guys and Dolls” is a solid-gold knockout. Hytner has always been strong on physical staging. Because he started out in opera, he has always known about crowd control and can shift the emotional temperature of a scene simply by how he commands groups of people on stage. After his runaway-hit, immersive productions of “Julius Caesar” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at his own Bridge Theatre, he now takes that skill up umpteen notches moving not just the actors in “Guys and Dolls” but a third of the audience.