THE Side By Side By Sondheim dinner nights and cabaret evenings were such a wickedly delicious success last Christmas, artistic director and self-confessed Sondheim nut Hannah Chissick decided to put it together again.

Each night in the black-box Studio this festive season, Bower's Bistro (of Cheltenham Crescent), Chissick's cast of five and piano-playing musical director Nigel Lilley are serving dinner theatre, preceded by champagne and canaps in the circle bar. It is not cheap at £45 a ticket, but as an alternative office party with all the sexual heat, prickly wit and arguments you could crave, Sondheim's musical theatre revue Putting It Together is the most sophisticated Christmas entertainment.

After a main course of pan-fried red mullet with pesto linguine or roast rump of lamb in a woodland mushroom jus, we are ushered into Sondheim's cynical milieu, an adult America far removed from the romantic, childhood fantasies of the Mother Goose pantomime downstairs.

Whereas last year's show had an urbane narrator, Putting It Together is moved onwards by a singing waiter (Mark Hilton, who swaps his initial guise of a nervous Harrogate Theatre volunteer for a smart New York bar man). While he is on call for increasingly bitter drinks, Nigel Lilley twinkles away beneath fairy lights, a bar stool to his side and steps either side of his platform.

Hilton serves two wide-eyed young lovers, Sophie Bould and Hadley Fraser, and two battle-scarred veterans from the love field, Alasdair Harvey and Rebecca Thornhill (last seen in Yorkshire as the screeching Lina Lamont in Singin' In The Rain at the West Yorkshire Playhouse).

Nick Winston's swish, sassy choreography captures this prowling, competitive nocturnal world. Sondheim's themes of lust and deceit, playing away and marital frustration, facelifts and face saving - drawn together from disparate musicals of dazzling, sour wit, waspish wordplay and frankly tricky tunes - acquire an intense, frictional focus in this intimate, elegant setting.

Choosing Christmas pudding or tarte aux fruits feels a guilty pleasure, but here you can have your cake and eat it; good food, wonderful singing and predatory dancing, by Thornhill in particular, and all that Sondheim nous.

Putting It Together, Harrogate Theatre Studio, until January 2. Box office: 01423 502116

Updated: 10:21 Wednesday, December 08, 2004