By Julie Stern

BRIDGEPORT — Let’s face it – I love Guys and Dolls, Frank Loesser’s Damon Runyon-inspired tale about Broadway hustlers and Salvation Army missionaries.

I have loved it since I was nine years old, when my parents took me to see the original production in New York, and I have loved it in summer stock, Richter Park, WestConn theater department and Newtown High drama club renditions, among others, ever since.

Loesser’s greatest and most successful work (and remember, he wrote both the words and the music for the 16 wonderful songs that make up the show) is a wonderful theatrical experience for both kids and grownups. Thus it was a special treat to learn that Bridgeport’s Downtown Cabaret Theater had chosen it as their big production, designed to close out the current millennium and start off the next.

Happily, DCT is the perfect company to do a great show perfect justice. From Jamie Rocco’s direction and Sharon Halley’s choreography, to Albert Evans’ musical direction and J. Branson’s vividly evocative sets, everything is done to the Cabaret’s impeccable standards.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the story, the plot interweaves the progress of two rocky romances: Adelaide, the dim-witted but warm-hearted nightclub dancer, has been waiting patiently for 14 years for her boyfriend, Nathan Detroit, to give up gambling and make an honest woman out of her. Nathan, anxious to get the $1,000 needed to secure the Biltmore Garage premises for his floating craps game, makes a sucker bet with inveterate high stakes player Sky Masterson, that Sky can’t take any “doll” Nathan names, on a junket to the wicked city of Havana, Cuba (this is, of course, pre-Castro).

Nathan chooses Sergeant Sarah Brown, a Salvation Army lassie who is attempting to run a mission in Times Square, and in the course of trying to salvage his bet, Sky falls in love…

Traditionally, it has usually been Adelaide, with her droll comic routines, who steals the show. Oklahoma native Amy Eschman does a great job here as the blonde bombshell, both as the lead singer of the Hot Box Girls, doing songs like “Take Back Your Mink (take back your poils… what made you think… that I was one of those goils…”) and in her plaintive lament about developing “Psychosomatic symptoms”  (“so in other woids just from worrying whether the wedding is on or off, a Person, can develop a cough…”)

In this production, however, Amanda Serkasevich turns Sarah Brown into a fiery redhead with a gleam in her eye that transcends the dowdy uniform, and Paul DePasquale’s Sky has a more battered and roughened edge to his looks than the matinee idol types who usually play the role. As a result, the two hold their own very well.

Director Rocco makes ideal use of the Cabaret layout. With the audience seated at tables clustered around the room, the characters move freely among them, stopping to interact briefly with the patrons. This is particularly effective every time the Salvation Army band makes an entrance or exit, marching to the bass drum and clashing cymbals as they sing “Follow the Fold…”

But it is those wonderful Loesser songs that will hopefully last forever — from the opening “Fugue for Tinhorns,” to the title song, from “Luck Be A Lady” and “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat” to Adelaide and Sarahs’ duet, “Marry the Man Today.”

In a recent packed house evening, smiling faces could be seen everywhere, with lips moving silently in remembered delight, as each musical gem unfolded. As with a great work of classical music, say Beethoven’s  Ninth or Mozart’s opera  about Figaro the barber, familiarity only increases the enjoyment. And as for friends and family members who have never yet seen the show, they should be taken at once!

(Call 203/576-1636 to contact Downtown Cabaret Theatre. Guys and Dolls continues at 263 Golden Hill Street in Bridgeport until February 13.)