Luck is being a real lady to the Crucible. The theatre continues to prove it is on a roll by nabbing a winner in the Frank Loesser musical based on Damon Runyon's short stories. Low life has never looked so attractive as it does here in the company of Nathan Detroit, a New York crap-game convenor, and his shady friends who have colourful names such as Harry the Horse and Nicely-Nicely.
Rachel Kavanaugh's production may lack the sharp outfits, delivery and choreography of the National Theatre's revival a few years back, but it pulls out all the stops when it counts with numbers such as Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat, and its generally low-key approach brings out every ounce of humanity in this teeming mess of tricksters and cheats, lovers and losers.
Peter McKintosh has come up with nifty costumes that make the guys vivid and larger than life. And he provides a clever set in which New York's skyscrapers fan the entire stage like glittering shark's teeth - seductive and dangerous, like the city itself. In fact one thing the production does really well is to match the upbeat exuberance of the music and lyrics with some of the fag-end, three-o'clock-in-the-morning haze of Runyon's original downbeat stories.
This is particularly apt for that "famous fiancée" Miss Adelaide, whose mother thinks she is married and has five kids - although she has failed to get Nathan Detroit to the altar after 14 years of engagement. In Tracie Bennett's blistering performance, she emerges as a figure who is as tragic as she is comic.
Bennett is nicely matched by Ian Bartholomew's Nathan Detroit, who so suggests the kind of Peter Pannish man who can never make a commitment that you know at the end, after agreeing to marry Adelaide, that it won't be long before he is back to his old tricks again.
It takes a while for Claire Carrie, as Sister Sarah Brown, to find both her voice and her spark, but Harry Burton's Sky Masterson - who takes on the Salvation Army do-gooder as a bet but then really falls for her - has just the right degree of raffish charm to make running off with him to Havana not completely out of the question.
But the city of New York is the real star, and Kavanaugh's production brings out its inhabitants foibles and follies, bewitchment and fascination, so that they emerge like ghosts, silhouetted against the skyline, forever telling their stories to anyone who will listen.
Until January 20. Box office: 0114 249 6000.
