Stage
Weales, Gerald
STAGE MOST HAPPY GUY LOESSER IS ALWAYS MORE VF hen Eric Bentley put together his idiosyncratic American-drama volume for his Anchor series, The Modern Theatre, he included the book of Guys and...
...The strength of the show is the dramatic ploy and the songs that carry it-character songs for the most part...
...and a How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, assuming that there are youthful Ray Bolgers and Robert Morses waiting to take center stage, we would have a Loesser full house or-putting Greenwillow aside-an unbeatable four-of-a-kind...
...The production at New York City Opera was distressingly wooden, particularly when one compares it with the fluidity Gerald Gutierrez's direction and Liza Gennaro's choreography bring to the Broadway version...
...For the final curtain, Sky Masterson has slipped on a Mission uniform and picked up the bass drum (shades of Cusins in Major Barbara) and Nathan Detroit has apparently let "the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York" sink...
...Most of the enthusiastic audience will simply respond to the here-and-now of the new production-and rightly so...
...GERALD WEALES Commonweal 22 May 1992: 13...
...and the comedy courtship of Cleo and Herman, even when it is played charmingly, as it is here, gets too cute for me...
...I would not take any man-taming messages too seriously...
...Fella has never seemed as much a consistent piece as Guys and Dolls does...
...Now if producers would come up with a Where's Charley...
...There was even an attempt in recent memory to resurrect Greenwillow off-Broadway...
...Occasional doubts surfaced in my general pleasure in the show, particularly when Faith Prince seemed to be working in too calculated a way-a sudden drop in register or in volume-to underline her comic effects...
...Based on They Knew What They Wanted, it sticks close to Sidney Howard's central plot, pares away some garrulous characters, and adds some comic ones to what is essentially a romantic drama...
...Fables are traditionally teaching tales, and if one looks closely enough at this fable-which I would not advise-it seems to be saying, as the title song does, that "love is the thing that has licked 'em," meaning all those guys, now 12: 22 May 1992 Commonweal settled into domesticity, who "used to be something of a rover...
...I may squirm slightly at some of the lines Sky has to sing in "I'll Know," but there are no musical dead spots...
...Miss Adelaide does marry the elusive Nathan and Sarah Brown gets the very willing Sky, but this is just fairy-tale happy-ending stuff...
...You have to have Loesser's music to get the real sense of the show...
...he even gets away with the impossible song tour he has to sing to his dead mama...
...By now everyone-at least, everyone who saw photographs of the lines forming outside the Martin Beck-knows that the revival is a hit...
...Even though it is more insistently musical (much of the dialogue is sung), the comic numbers like "Big D" and "Standin' on the Corner," however amusing, come as intrusions, breaking the dramatic thrust of the play...
...Jerry Zaks, the director, has stuck close to the original production, although there are some new tricks-the constant juxtaposition of tiny, round Ernie Sabella's Harry the Horse and Herschel Sparber's giant Big Jule...
...So it should be...
...The sentimental songs are effective and affecting, and the comedy numbers-particularly the admirable "Fugue for Tinhorns"-are not only delightful in their own right but give the show the gritty texture that makes it so appealing...
...There are still people who think so, although other contenders have come along in the last thirty-five years...
...Up the block from the Martin Beck, where Guys and Dolls is playing, The Most Happy Fella is running at the Booth...
...Josie de Guzman is the weakest of the principals, but that is partly because Sarah Brown is so muted a character among this band of grand caricatures...
...What is obvious, however, is that Frank Loesser is firmly fixed in the pantheon of Broadway composers, and he has the revivals to prove it...
...The Most Happy Fella, down from the Goodspeed Opera House, is also a first-rate revival...
...Broadway gamblers and hoods and shady ladies may never have been like this in the real world, but the real world is better for having them in Loesser's gloss on Runyon...
...It is probably only old folks like me who go comparative at revivals (I decline to tell you my reactions to A Streetcar Named Desire...
...I am one of the guys who prefer Loesser in his Broadway low-life vein, but if you are a fella with a taste for somewhat more exalted Loesser, The Most Happy Fella at the Booth is for you...
...It was 1965 when Bentley's collection was published, six years after the musical opened on Broadway...
...There are no bad songs in Guys and Dolls...
...Nathan Lane's Nathan Detroit and Faith Prince's Adelaide are flamboyantly comic and Peter Gallagher's Sky is impressive, more charm than smarm...
...One does not go to Guys and Dolls for its plot, although it is fun to watch it unravel, or for any implications that might spin off it...
...Guys and Dolls, as the subtitle says, is "A Musical Fable of Broadway...
...The triumph of the show is its score...
...Even the Spanish number-a requisite of 1950s' musicals-is amusing...
...Spiro Malas is particularly good as Tony, not simply because he has a fine voice, but because he can get the shyness, the effervescence, the vulnerability of the character...
...STAGE MOST HAPPY GUY LOESSER IS ALWAYS MORE VF hen Eric Bentley put together his idiosyncratic American-drama volume for his Anchor series, The Modern Theatre, he included the book of Guys and Dolls as one of the plays that "show the American theatre at its liveliest," that "move with the swing of the American life-rhythm...
...I wondered if Nathan Lane's very soft "so nu" in "Sue Me," deemphasizing the rhyme, was an unnecessary assertion that he is not Sam Levene, and if Prince's flat, throwaway delivery of "I could honestly die" in the same song was a distancing from the way Vivian Blain carried the line noisily into tears...
...there was also a production of it earlier this season at the New York City Opera...
...he suggested that Guys and Dolls might be the best American musical comedy...
...It is awash in cartoon color-Tony Walton's sets and William Ivey Long's costumes-the singingdancing chorus is continually and happily on edge...
...It does all that, certainly, but it is difficult to tell quite how when one looks at the text on the page, even though the book that Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows carved out of the Damon Runyon mother lode has vitality of its own and the marvelously inventive lyrics of Frank Loesser are there for the reader...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
