Guys and Dolls, Nederlander Theatre, New York

The conventional wisdom: Guys and Dolls is so sure-fire that a producer could shove trained canaries into this 1950 show about two-bit gamblers by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows and come up lucky. Songbirds could probably sing with more consistent freshness than some of the warblers in Des McAnuff’s new Broadway staging. But we go to Guys and Dolls less for purveyors of pristine pitch than for a sense of raffish joy, and by this criterion the production delivers, if more solidly in the second act than in the first.

Guys and Dolls is celebrated for its perfect construction, but I’ve always been bothered by its lapses in logic. Suave gambler Sky Masterson, for example, whisks the missionary Sarah Brown from the show’s main setting, mid-town Manhattan, to Havana and back with warp speed unknown to the show’s timeframe, between the world wars in this instance. And Loesser’s ridiculously hummable tunes are not necessarily matched by his lyrics.

If McAnuff’s production is considerably more enjoyable than its early reviews suggest, it doesn’t quite land with his signature slickness (eg Jersey Boys), and it lacks the impeccable casting of the 1992 Broadway revival led by Nathan Lane and Peter Gallagher. Lane’s Nathan Detroit milked every ounce of yuks from Burrow’s Damon Runyon-inspired script; here, Oliver Platt’s Nathan, with his bulldog mug, sets off titters rather than guffaws. Television star Lauren Graham’s burlesque dancer Miss Adelaide is similarly underwhelming.

Craig Bierko’s Masterson sometimes comes across more as a song salesman, reminiscent of the actor’s brilliant Harold Hill in The Music Man, than song presenter. When he intones the show’s creamiest number, “My Time of Day,” with its Sinatra-esque “wee small hours” lyric (a song cut from the Sinatra-driven movie), the effect is lovely, less from Bierko’s rendition than from the fact that the set, by Robert Brill, has banished the midtown neon.

So where do the joys reside? In Dustin O’Neill’s video design, in which giant rear-stage projections ingeniously match the turning of more conventional sets and provide a nifty, non-realistic evocation of a New York where a hot dog cost a nickel, newspapers were a growth industry and everyone wore a hat.

Similarly exuberant: the bell-clear soprano of Kate Jennings Grant, spectacular as Sarah; the infectious choreography of Sergio Trujillo, especially during “The Crapshooter’s Dance”; the inspired musical direction of Ted Sperling; and the shot-from-guns movement of chorus dancers John Selya and Ron Todorowski. Most delectable of all is Mary Testa’s General Cartwright, whose ability to steal scenes is a more actionable felony than any of the guys’ gambling.

Tel +1 212 307 4100