No luck needed for excellent ‘Guys and Dolls’

Under the creative direction of John Rando, with a cast that boasts energy, talent, and personality to burn, this buoyantly brassy “Guys and Dolls’’ does full justice to the qualities that made Loesser special.

Namely, lyrics whose ingenious wordplay and use of vernacular slang (in this case, Runyonesque) are married to irresistible melodies that range from rousing to wistful, so your toes are tapping one minute and you’re lulled into a dreamy reverie the next. Because of Loesser’s attention to craft and story, love songs like “I’ve Never Been in Love Before’’ do not issue arbitrarily or generically from the mouths of whoever is singing them (I’m looking at you, Bono, The Edge, and “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’’), but rather serve to reveal and even deepen said characters.

Of course, not too deep. “Guys and Dolls’’ is, after all, one of the great musical comedies, and this production scores plenty high on the laughs-per-scene index. (Abe Burrows, who also helped write the book for “How to Succeed,’’ wrote most of “Guys and Dolls’’ after replacing Jo Swerling.) Nor is this production solely reliant on witty words: The choreography by Joshua Bergasse is first-rate and sometimes electrifying, especially in “The Crapshooter’s Dance,’’ a showstopping number in which members of the ensemble take turns doing back flips.