Simpson is a deadset charmer in Guys & Dolls

Casting Cody Simpson as Sky Masterson in Guy & Dolls was something of a gamble – even if he’s not entirely a newcomer to musical theatre. It has paid handsome dividends.

Jason Arrow as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Joel Granger as Benny Southstreet and John Xintavelonis as Harry the Horse in Guys & Dolls. Picture: Neil Bennett

Guys & Dolls. Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, Opera Australia. Fleet Steps, Mrs Macquaries Point, Sydney, March 21.

The guys have it.

Casting Cody Simpson as Sky Masterson in Guy & Dolls was something of a gamble even if he’s not entirely a newcomer to musical theatre. It paid handsome dividends. The pop singer/elite swimmer (can anyone else claim that description?) is a deadset charmer as the silky smooth gambler whose life is turned around by love.

The insurance, should any have been needed, was the choice of Bobby Fox as Nathan Detroit. It’s no stretch at all to see him in the pivotal role of the crap-game fixer whose aversion to converting a long engagement into marriage is the show’s running gag.

Cody Simpson as Sky Masterson and Bobby Fox as Nathan Detroit. Picture: Neil Bennett

The dolls who love these rascals? Well they don’t come out of things quite as well on the vast Sydney Harbour outdoor stage. It’s a testing arena that’s far more welcoming to big song-and-dance numbers (or arias, when opera is seen in this format) than lengthy book scenes.

Just the thinnest narrative thread pulls together vignettes of long-ago New York life on the margins. The book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows is based on Damon Runyon characters and makes much of Runyon’s comically formal language for scrappy, colourful characters.

Too much really. The vast swathes of dialogue are amusing, mostly, when they involve the rag-tag gamblers desperately pressing Detroit to find them a venue for their illicit activities. When the story moves to the Save-a-Soul Mission where Annie Aitken’s forthright, buttoned-up Sister Sarah is headquartered, things can get a tiny bit dull.

Aitken does, however, get to share with Simpson the show’s dreamiest song, I’ve Never Been in Love Before. His lovely light baritone and her high soprano float blissfully into the night air.

Annie Aitken as Sarah Brown. Picture: Neil Bennett

A significantly tougher assignment is Miss Adelaide, sexpot headliner at the Hot Box (yes, truly) nightclub and simultaneously Detroit’s sweet, long-time fiancée. Angelina Thomson tackles the part gamely but doesn’t quite conquer it.

Guys & Dolls asks you to transport yourself back to a time when all a careless man needed to save himself from himself was the love of a good, long-suffering woman.

Well, it was written 75 years ago and subtitled A Musical Fable but the indisputable get-out-of-jail card is Frank Loesser’s score. Here it sounds beyond luscious in the hands of music director Guy Simpson and a crack 26-piece orchestra, served well by Jim Atkins’s sound design.

The band’s grand placement above the stage instead of under it is one of the many inspirations in Brian Thomson’s bold set that screams New York and gambling and, crucially, leaves all the room in the world for Kelley Abbey’s exhilarating choreography. She takes 20th-century Broadway flavours and triumphantly remakes them.

The spectacle – and the dance and action scenes truly earn that word - is zhuzhed to the max by Jennifer Irwin’s terrific costumes and all is well with the world when Guys & Dolls is on the move.

Guy & Dolls was programmed and was to be directed by Jo Davies, formerly and briefly OA’s artistic director. She is credited with the “original concept”. Presumably that means she chose key creative people and that her successor as director, Shaun Rennie, had the good fortune to inherit them.

Not all Rennie’s directorial decisions work, most egregiously in the case of bizarrely twitchy Big Jule (Doron Chester) and Lt. Brannigan (Thomas Campbell, saddled with a speech impediment).

They were discordant notes in an evening otherwise pitched to please.

Tickets: $79-$389. Bookings; online. Duration: three hours including interval. Ends April 20.