To aid that sense of being driven, Hytner’s production had a set that was literally moving: it had to go where it had to go. It was on the edge of dance the whole time. It’s a show that can never stand still and it felt as though the physical production was driving it, which is amazing because it’s usually a bit static. And because all the boys and girls on stage were so sexy, and we were standing among them, it meant we felt sexy too. To make a unified world – that we were part of – was fantastic. I loved the naughtiness, including going to a gay club in Havana. That openness and effortless sexiness is really what the piece is about.

And the music was so brilliantly performed. I went so many times that I got to watch the band. The string players all used their bows in exactly the same way together. You never see that in pit bands and it really affects the sound. It demonstrates the pride that absolutely everyone was taking in the performance.

Analysis – David Benedict

Asked to name their top three classic musicals, almost every theatre specialist will include Guys and Dolls. It sprang to life on Broadway in 1950 when musicals were called musical comedies and, from start to finish, it joyfully embodies both the ’musical’ and ’comedy’ sides of that description. The musical was based on the knowing, wisecracking, 1920s and 1930s New York short stories of Damon Runyon. Brimming with idiosyncratic slang and comic dialect, it boasted a taut and terrific book by Abe Burrows (replacing a rejected one by Jo Swerling) and music and lyrics by zesty movie and pop songwriter Frank Loesser, who’d only written one previous musical, Where’s Charley?, based on the British farce Charley’s Aunt.

There’s not a dud song in the score and yet it’s still possible to mess the show up. But Nicholas Hytner’s production was a knockout, runaway hit. ’Immersive’ is a horribly overused term, but Hytner, who started out working with huge casts in opera, long ago proved himself a master of immersing audiences into the action in powerful productions at his own Bridge Theatre. Stage managers dressed as NYC cops ushered audiences around Bunny Christie’s hydraulic platforms that rose and fell, creating multiple locations. Bathed in and guided by Paule Constable’s colour-saturated light, a dynamite cast, choreographed with character-based energy by Arlene Phillips and James Cousins, delivered the goods in every department. It was the most exuberant, life-affirming show in town.

Jeremy Sams is a director, translator and composer