Based on Damon Runyon’s short story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” with the added comic super sauce of characters imported from other stories (Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Liver Lips Louie, Benny Southstreet), Guys and Dolls: A Musical Fable of Broadway is being given a unique, unmissable environmental production by Nicholas Hytner at London’s Bridge Theatre. Of the long list of hit Broadway musicals—West Side Story, On the Town, Company, Rent, A Chorus Line, Damn Yankees—Guys and Dolls, which premiered in 1950 with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, is the most exuberant, affectionate, best written, and, by my lights, most lyrically deft. Hytner has cleared away the orchestra seats and taken the musical off the proscenium and into the audience. In my years of theatergoing, I’ve seen some wild things: people throwing their coats on a horseshoe stage for the star to walk on, or stuffing handkerchiefs in their mouths to stop from laughing. But I’ve never seen an ecstatic response quite like this. In the lingo of the Great White Way, it’s socko. —John Lahr