THEATRE / Guys and Dolls - Young Vic Theatre

The guys, in spats and double-breasted suits, stand with hips strutting forward, shoulders hunched up to their hats; the dolls, in high heels and tea-dresses, sway across the stage with a hoity-toity air, but a giggle in their walk.

It's in these details, the physical gestures, that the Young Vic Youth Theatre's production of Guys and Dolls shines. Not in the intimate narrative moments, but in the big showtime numbers, where the young cast of 30 seems to part and converge on stage like so many ballbearings on a magnetic field. The tight choreography of 'Take Back Your Mink', say, or 'Luck, Be a Lady' is matched by a confidence and exuberance in the collected singers and dancers that makes up for the weaker points of the production - an uneven grasp of the American accent (which too often slips or is swallowed), the odd awkward encounter or plunging high note.

As Sarah Brown and Sky Masterson, Nicola Kingston and Ben Caplan warm as the production progresses and while they may initially seem a mismatched couple in more ways than one - she can act, he can sing - their final communion is still moving. Juliet Aghion is gutsily over-the-top as that adenoidal poisson, Miss Adelaide (one hand clutching a streaming nose, the other held out entreatingly to her errant lover), although her best moment is probably the restrained duet with Miss Kingston, 'Marry the Man Today'. But the show really goes to the hoods, to Simon Meacock's gormless Nicely-Nicely Johnson (a sort of Mick Hucknall with a scowl), Mark Fleishmann's cocky Benny Southstreet, and Gary Moynihan's wonderful Nathan Detroit - perfectly pitched between card-sharpness and romantic hopelessness.

To 1 August (071-928 6363)