LONDON "Dirty Blonde" has taken four years to reach the West End from Broadway, adding an intermission in the process, and one wonders whether a British audience will feel it was worth the wait. London is famous for responding far less well to yesterday’s New York hits than is generally the case the other way around, and that fact is complicated in this instance by a show steeped in the legend and lore of the Brooklyn-born Mae West, who isn’t necessarily the icon in England that she has long been in the United States.

Luckily, "Dirty Blonde," at the Duke of York’s, doesn’t entirely depend on recreations of some of West’s more defining routines, as here delivered by Claudia Shear, who is both the star and author. (Her able director, James Lapine, shares credit with Shear for having co-conceived the work.) While Shear’s script canters through a boilerplate account of West’s life, the biography is folded into a fictive story about Jo (also played by Shear), an office temp and would-be actress, and the shyer-than-shy Charlie (the inimitable Kevin Chamberlin), two modern-day West enthusiasts whose joint obsession leads them toward the discovery that they just might be soulmates.

The play has that undertow of sentimentality that tends to put British critics on edge. But at its best, Shear has devised both a durable star vehicle for herself and a bittersweet comedy about the way in which two worshipful souls discover, through a common icon, that they only have eyes for each other.

The structure, too, weaves deftly between West then and her admirers now, not least in a climactic moment of drag for the indrawn Charlie that serves both narratives at once: the sequence, beautifully managed by the cherub-faced Chamberlin, is the evening’s high point.

London is lucky, too, to have on hand the entire original New York cast, starting with Bob Stillman in multiple roles. Chamberlin, in turn, is even more delicately moving than before - the man should do some Chekhov - and then spryly witty when he suddenly reveals a gift for mimicry. As for Shear, she may not have it in her to capture exactly that snapdragon authority that made West both astonishing and kind of frightening. On the other hand, the actress is a savvy enough writer to know what West witticisms these days still get a laugh. Among them, my favorite finds Shear/West staring sternly at her cleavage: "Get in there, girls," she barks, "and behave yourselves."

"When Harry Met Sally" may hardly feel like a title one needed to meet again, especially after the deservedly tepid response to the February opening, at the Theater Royal, Haymarket, of this theatrical adaptation of the much-loved 1989 film. Well, what a difference a cast makes: Gone are Luke Perry and Alyson Hannigan from Loveday Ingram’s production, which continues to take place on the most severely clinical and anonymous sets for so New York a story. On board now for the summer are onetime Brat Pack-er Molly Ringwald, inheriting Meg Ryan’s screen role as Sally, and another American TV name, Michael Landes, filling Billy Crystal’s cinematic shoes as Harry.

And they’re a lot better. Sure, Ringwald looks pretty long-in-the-tooth to play the guileless new recruit to Manhattan whom we see in the opening scene struggling with the locks on the very apartment that Harry comes to paint. But Ringwald grows into the role: If she’s never ditzy in the Meg Ryan manner, she has an attractive sincerity to counter the hyper-fastidiousness of a character who, in other thespian hands, could be mighty irritating.

Landes is even more engaging. Not only can he land the laugh lines that more or less passed his predecessor by, but he gets the arc of emotional diffidence turned slowly to dismay as Harry realizes across a dozen-plus years that, lo and behold, he has loved Sally all along. Though Marcy Kahan’s script is scarcely more polished than the direction (the ending still doesn’t work), the show now boasts a quality that, in the theater, can be hardest to achieve: genuine, unaffected charm.