GUYS AND DOLLS
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Yeah, yeah, I know: the daily reviewers raved after last week’s opening. Maybe the matinee the Sun-Times and Tribune writers saw was better than the fast-paced but mechanical and lifeless performance I attended that night. (Though at a $57 top ticket price, you should expect at least consistency.) But I can’t imagine that, even in top form, stolid light-opera veteran Richard Muenz would fit the role of sexy smoothie Sky Masterson, the gambler whose courtship of Salvation Army worker Sarah Brown drives the plot; nor can I conceive of a less engaging choice for the feisty Sarah than dowdy Patricia Ben Peterson, whose bell-like soprano invests the character’s lovely songs with all the thrill of a glee-club solo. And while Philip LeStrange and Beth McVey are physically credible (though too old and hard) as Nathan Detroit, promoter of “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York,” and burlesque singer Miss Adelaide, Nathan’s fiancee of 14 years, they convey more pathos than pluck in their handling of this potentially hilarious comic couple.
But the real problem with this Guys and Dolls is its lack of atmosphere–always the strong suit in the 1950 musical fashioned from Damon Runyon’s stories by songwriter Frank Loesser, playwright Abe Burrows, and original director George S. Kaufman. (Burrows cited him as the script’s unofficial principal writer, while, according to Loesser’s daughter Susan in her book A Most Remarkable Fella, supposed coauthor Jo Swerling wrote “not a word” of the final draft.) The dozen or so stock and community versions I’ve seen made me laugh more than this cruise-ship-slick staging because of the wonderful comic business they created for the supporting and background characters, lovably loutish racketeers with names like Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Rusty Charlie, Big Jule, and Angie the Ox. These guys may not have much dialogue, but in any halfway decent production they’ll all have their own little tics and shticks to make the show’s mythic 1940s Times Square setting come to delightful life. Here the supporting characters have not a whit of individuality; they’re just models for costume designer William Ivey Long’s exaggerated pinstripes and zoot suits, reviving only when they execute Christopher Chadman’s stylish choreography.
