When the West End’s latest revival of Guys and Dolls first opened last summer, all attention was inevitably focused on Ewan McGregor’s debut as an all-singing, all-dancing Sky Masterson, with Broadway’s Jane Krakowski also making an Olivier Award winning turn as Miss Adelaide. The show quickly recouped its investment, and is now onto its third set of principal actors that are working to keep it fresh but also more importantly to deepen and make the show even richer. For it is no longer focused by two star turns; instead, director Michael Grandage brilliantly ensures that it offers up a series of infinitely textured and minutely detailed personalities that spring to fully-formed life in from Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows’ book based on Damon Runyon stories.

In the process, while anchoring this affectionate cartoon portrait of a fictional low-life New York in a grittier reality, Grandage has also given us a production where the colour is provided by the characters, not the sets, with the bright lights of Broadway rendered in mere lightbulbs rather than the blazing neon that everyone remembers from London’s last Guys and Dolls, directed by Richard Eyre at the National in 1982 (and also revived there in 1996). But the new set of principals ensures that the show is shining just as brightly as before, if not more so.

Billed as a Donmar Warehouse production, but produced by commercial partners directly in the West End, Grandage applies the Donmar’s unique aesthetic onto a larger canvas. It’s not just the famous brick back wall of the Donmar that has been integrated into Christopher Oram's set as a key design feature, but there’s also the same intense focus on detail and atmosphere, rather than bedazzling spectacle, that typically marks out a Donmar musical. In other words, it places its emphasis on people, not props, and puts characterisation above caricature.

That’s embodied usefully here by Neil Morrissey, taking over as the commitment-phobic Nathan Detroit who, far from the lovable rogue of previous occupants of the role from Nathan Lane on Broadway, Bob Hoskins at the National or original incumbent Douglas Hodge in this production, actually comes across as slightly sleazy. The slavish devotion of Sally Ann Triplett’s brazen Miss Adelaide–whose profession isn’t the ambiguously polite nightclub hostess of most productions, but it is clear here that she is actually a stripper–is an act of desperation; will she ever get what she truly wants?

There’s also edge and sass in equal measures in the improbable but inevitable way that gambler Sky Masterson and Salvation Army missionary Sister Sarah Brown gravitate towards each other. Sister Sarah isn’t quite as uptight as she wants to project; as she unbuttons–in every sense–when Sky takes her to Havana, she is showing her true colours in an act of hilarious rebellion. As played now by Adam Cooper (a former Royal Ballet principal dancer and a Tony nominee for Swan Lake), Sky has a cool insouciance, and moves with effortless grace. Kelly Price, a former understudy to the role of Sarah now moving to take it over, is an utter delight: blessed with a shimmering soprano and an appealing vulnerability, she is pure charm.

The biggest star of the show, though, is Rob Ashford’s galvanising choreography, set to the sensational dance arrangements of David Chase that are simply thrilling. In the sewer ballet, windmilling arms and air punching fists, handstands and leg kicks combine in an explosion of movement and energy that is representative of the production itself.

Guys and Dolls