On Stage

...contradictorily, Guy Lombardo has been turned into Lawrence Welk...

...The one place where the new orchestrations work is in "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat," a protospiritual to begin with, brought rousingly into its own...

...A no less dismal Papp black Electro was hardly around long enough to earn disaster rating, painful as it was to sit through...

...The musical's chief strength, however, lies in its splendidly sophisticated score, and the able 1950 arrangements of George Bassman, who also wrote such fine film scores of the period as the one for Minnelli's The Clock...

...She has a basic expression that is quizzical in both senses: puzzled and mocking, bemused and amused...

...The romantic story concerns the dapper gambler Sky Masterson and the upper-class Salvation Army girl, Miss Sarah Brown, a distant and pallid relative of Shaw's Major Barbara...

...Wilson does not strike me as a sufficiently imaginative choreographerdirector...

...was mildly clever junk, and when it had run its course in white...

...Why should melanosis be as pathological on stage as it is in the skin...

...The current Guys and Dolls, on the other hand, received very good reviews, though it barely deserved them in my opinion, and is a hit...

...Hello, Dolly...

...Merrick conceived a black production as a curiosity and sales gimmick...

...Instead he sings, "It's true, so true," a marked loss, albeit hardly the only or greatest one the show has incurred by its—what shall I call it...

...I suppose it is mostly because today's prevalent pop idiom, rock, is too simplistic, too primitive to accommodate the complex requirements of drama...

...We are, in any event, not yet used to a hierarchic black society...

...Ernestine Jackson can find no characterization for Sarah (as she did so delightfully for Ruth Younger in Raisin), and flounders hopelessly...

...The rest of the cast ranges from passable to insignificant...

...The greatest inadequacy is in the casting...

...Her voice and face are pretty, but she has legs so thin that you worry they'll collapse under her any minute...

...Nathan Detroit and Adelaide, the comic couple, are an unromantically businesslike gambler and his stripper girlfriend to whom he has been "engaged" for 14 years, always managing to wiggle out of marriage...

...Guys and Dolls (1950), with music and lyrics by Loesser, has a book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows "based on a story and characters by Damon Runyon," and it is enough of a work of art...

...There are other weaknesses...

...It is hard to imagine, in the looser, more proletarian context of black gamblers and strippers, either Adelaide's desperate craving or Nathan's stubborn resistance to marriage, both of them aspects of reverence for it...

...although on a humble level, to make certain authentic social observations that are embedded in time and place and ethnicity...

...The object in this case is to show that love can reform a gambler into an altruist, precisely what a gambler basically isn't, while it can turn a classy and cold young woman into a mere "dame" or "doll" in love, no different from such a lowlife as Miss Adelaide...

...to establish Miss Sarah's social superiority would require some fancy rewriting, or at least a certain accent and demeanor that neither Ernestine Jackson, who plays her, nor the direction can supply...

...If the plotting were more honestly uncompromising, there would be no "happy ending" here, and the two would either separate or, more likely, continue as they were: fighting, making up, and staying unmarried...

...And also the knack, invaluable for musical comedy, of making everything a bit more playful than strictly necessary, without, however, stooping to farce...

...Elsewhere, the musical style tends to be indeterminate, mixing past and present to the disadvantage of both...

...We get two parallel love stories: one rather romantic, one comic...

...So let me resort to a medical term: melanosis, i.e., the abnormal development of black pigment in a tissue...

...why, then, should a show with changed pigmentation prove a horse of such different color...

...The idea is to give a lot of black actors a chance to extend their repertoires, or to employ as many of them as possible at a time when there is not much work for them otherwise, or to draw more black audiences into the Broadway theater, or to provide a new thrill...

...Though it is not stated, they are implied to be Jewish—by their names, turns of phrase, and (in production) accents...

...If Guys and Dolls is a hit, and not unbearable even for me, it is because of those truly fine songs, despite the tampering with some of the lyrics, notably those for the best number of all, "Marry the Man Today...

...Certainly there is no good reason for their marriage, other than the example set by Sarah and Sky, along with a feeble attempt of Adelaide's to play hard to get...

...because strong family feeling and middle-class morality are prevalent among the Jewish bourgeoisie whose dropouts Nathan and Adelaide are, we understand and are amused by her elaborate lies to her hinterlands family about being a wife and mother...

...the love-as-leveler motif...

...It has a gimmick: It is performed by an all-black cast...

...As Sky Masterson, James Randolph is even more numbing...

...Blackening...

...Still, this couple serves to show the comic underside of romance...

...But such girls would not be in the Salvation Army—especially if the time were 1950, as some of the lines suggest: The Roxy theater, for instance, has been kept...

...It paid off by making the show run a few more years...

...I am not one of those who object to this Guys and Dolls because, as they allege, it fosters a ghetto mentality, implying that black actors cannot freely mingle with white ones...

...Though some of these aims are more laudable than the others, none of them seems justifiable to me...

...She sings well, dances plausibly, and is gifted with the face of a sexy clown...

...i.e...

...The only question is whether it is a good one...

...Having duly departed hence, it needs no further comment from me except this: Let no one say that any show (play, musical, opera—whatever) is so good as to be indestructible...

...Most of what applies to the main characters applies to the minor ones, too: Everything, including the sense of time and place, has become less palpable and believable...

...Only one performer is wholly up to the material: Norma Donaldson as Miss Adelaide...

...Not that the original Guys and Dolls was a piece of photographic realism, but it had a mythic reality: Damon Runyon's miniverse acquired, through media like newspapers and the movies, a fictional solidity...

...It is fairly preposterous for a black to sing repeatedly, "Alright, already," or for Adelaide to have to sing her famous "Lament" with its comic reiterations of "a person" without being able to turn it into a poison...

...But whereas you can do anything you want to with junk, Sophocles, Chekhov and even Frank Loesser are another matter...

...That would be ambiguous...

...The sets by Tom H. John, obviously done on a shoestring, are lacking in charm and evocativeness —the San Juan scene (in 1950 it was Havana) is pitiful...

...The point is not just local color...

...no attempt has been made to make the book and lyrics "black," beyond a few unavoidable modifications...

...It is very slightly updated, with large chunks left unchanged...

...Well might you ask after hearing the songs, "Why don't they write musicals like that today...

...There is no easy way of suggesting the social abyss between Sky and Sarah...

...The present arrangement by Danny Holgate and Horace Ott (the former responsible for the ruinous arrangements and lackluster additional songs of Bubbling Brown Sugar) are on the "black" and "now" side—although not so much as they would have been had not Abe Burrows been "supervisor of the entire production," and, apparently, frequent overrider of Billy Wilson, its black director and choreographer...

...Looking like the minister of a rather toney church and showing no sign of a gambler's quick wit (or of any other kind), he depends on his dignified good looks and on a strong but unbeautiful voice, sounding tinny and strained like an old 78 RPM recording played loud on fancy new equipment...

...Her opposite number, Robert Guillaume, for all his blackness, is a colorless Nathan Detroit...

...A contagiously alive performer, Miss Donaldson has every kind of presence: presence of mind, stage presence, and just plain presence—the quality of being as powerfully there even when doing nothing as a stop sign on a highway...

...People are people, regardless of their coloration...

...The most famous cases of melanosis in recent New York theatrical history were David Merrick's black Hello, Dolly!, which I missed...

...The long-distance pressure exerted by Adelaide's family is thus even less in keeping...

...Bernard Johnston's costumes are adequate...

...The comic lovers present a similar problem...

...Improperly packaged or preserved, a superb show, like a badly canned soup, can give you botulism...

...Surely nobody in this day and age would assume that an all-black production is anything but a device...

...Thus in the "Sue Me" duet, the gambler Nathan Detroit can no longer sing to Miss Adelaide, his angry fiancee of 14 years' standing, "It's true, so nu...

...This is where the current production falls down...

...And a linguistic difficulty is added: Both Nathan and Adelaide speak with the syntax and inflections of Brooklyn —a fantasy Brooklyn, perhaps, but a very vivid and Semitic one...

...and Joseph Papp's—or James Earl Jones'—black Cherry Orchard, which was catastrophic...

...The Pal Joey that Ted Mann directed at his Circle in the Square was an unmitigated disaster...

...Of course, there are rich black girls today with every solidly middle-class privilege...