by Frank Rizzo
view article on Courant.com
Don Stephenson knows “Guys and Dolls” inside and out. After all, his father-in-law — Frank Loesser — wrote the score.
But he hasn’t performed in the musical based on Damon Runyon’s stories of colorful saints and sinners of long-ago Times Square since he played Angie the Ox when he was at the University of Tennessee decades ago. And he never directed it until he was tapped to stage the show for the Goodspeed Opera House, which is now in previews and opening April 29 at the East Haddam theater.
But how do you make fresh a show that is so much a part of the culture, a staple production for high schools, colleges, regional theaters, and several Broadway revivals — not to mention a hit film starring Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando?
“The first thing I told the cast on the first day of rehearsals is that you have to do this show like it’s brand new,” says Stephenson recently during a break from rehearsals. “Pretend like Abe [book writer Abe Burrows] and Frank are here and they’re cranking it out and they’re just bringing the script’s pages in. But the good thing is that we’re not going to be getting any rewrites.”
The show is perfection as it is, he says, one that’s been tested over time and it’s — to use the parlance of the show — a sure bet.
The musical is based primarily on Runyon’s story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,”— about a smooth gambler Sky Masterson and a buttoned-up Salvation Army missionary. But it also takes characters and inspiration from his other stories, too.
Loesser wrote the music and lyrics and Burrows wrote the book after the show’s original script by Jo Swerling was dropped. (Swerling still gets top writing billing.) The show won the Tony Award for best musical in 1950.
“It’s helpful to talk to the guy who wrote the show,” says Stephenson. But the show’s creators have long passed on to a greater white way (Loesser died in 1969 at the age of 59.) “But I have access to the show’s history, and he did a lot of recordings of himself singing a lot of the songs and I listened to those really carefully to try to get as close as I could to his intentions. And then my mother-in-law [Jo Sullivan Loesser] and my wife Emily and my sister-in-law, all these people who knew him, who would say, ‘Frank liked it whenever…’ or ‘Frank didn’t like it when…’ was extremely helpful.”
Revivals
The original Broadway production, starring Robert Alda, Isabel Bigley, Sam Levene and Vivian Blaine, and directed by George S. Kaufman, won five Tony Awards, including best musical, running for 1,200 performances. It was one of the few major musicals of the era not to play the Shubert Theater in New Haven prior to Broadway, though tours played that theater in 1954, 1984, 1992 (with Lorna Luft) and 2001 (with Maurice Hines).
The musical has been revived many times on Broadway, first in 1955 (with Walter Matthau as Nathan and Helen Gallagher as Miss Adelaide); then in 1965 (Alan King as Nathan, Jerry Orbach as Sky). In 1976, there was an all-black show with soul- and jazz-infused orchestrations starring Robert Guillaume, James Randolph and Ernestine Jackson and Ken Page.
A celebrated version came to Broadway in 1992 with Nathan Lane, Faith Prince, Peter Gallagher and Josie de Guzman. Most recently the show was revived in 2009, directed by Des McAnuff, starring Oliver Platt, Lauren Graham, Craig Bierko and Kate Jennings Grant.
This is the first time the show has played the Goodspeed Opera House and Stephenson’s bow as director there.
A film version, released in 1955, starring Brando, Sinatra, Jean Simmons and — recreating their Broadway performances — Blaine and Stubby Kaye, who sang the show’s “11 o’clock number, “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat.”
Stevenson says Loesser thought the film version was “OK but not great.” Loesser added the song “Traveling Light” for Sinatra, originally cut in the stage show because of Levene’s limited singing ability. A song for Brando, “A Woman in Love” was also added.
Stephenson isn’t inserting the songs into the Goodspeed show, “but we’re doing all of [the frequently cut] “Runyonland,” all of the Havana sequence “with not a single cut bar (of the underscoring and dance music).”
Talk of a new film version of the musical occasionally rises along with names such as Steven Spielberg, Baz Luhrmann, Hugh Jackman and Tom (Spielberg and Cruise both performed in the musical when they were in high school and profess a deep affection for it.)
In December, 2013, 20th Century Fox announced that Danny Strong (“The Butler,” the last two installments of “The Hunger Games”) was tapped to write a screenplay and Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were mentioned in those reports. Stephenson says he doesn’t know the current status of any of those deals.
Essential Loesser
So why has “Guys and Dolls” endured and grown in stature over the past 65 years?
“Having grown up in Tennessee, New York was always this magical place,” says Stephenson. “And the New York in ‘Guys and Dolls’ is the New York the way you wished it was. People go to New York and are disappointed that they don’t sound like ‘Guys and Dolls.’ This show is a valentine to that New York. It’s not realistic. Its’ not like ‘The Sopranos.’ No one is going to get shanked. These gangsters are cute and funny.”
Stephenson says that the show works best when the focus is on the romantic leads, and not the colorful characters such as Nicely Nicely, Big Julie, Harry the Horse, Nathan Detroit and the ultimate fading chorine, Miss Adelaide.
“A lot of times the show can be stolen by Nathan and Adelaide because they have all this funny stuff, and if you have a couple of really good comic actors they can run with it — and they will — and then the audience is just waiting for the two funny ones to come back on. The show works best when you’re invested in the romance of Sky and Sarah.”
The show was ahead of its time in its balance of comedy and tenderness, says Stephenson. “It can go from someone saying something really funny to suddenly it’s really poignant on a dime. You have to have actors who can navigate that.”
The Goodspeed cast includes Anthony Roach (Hartford Stage’s “Hamlet”) as Sky Masterson, Nancy Anderson (Goodspeed’s “By Jeeves,” “Fanny Hill,” “City of Angels”) as Miss Adelaide, Manna Nichols (national tour of “Miss Saigon”) as Sarah Brown, Mark Price (Goodspeed’s “All Shook Up”) as Nathan Detroit and Scott Cote as Nicely-Nicely.
Comments are closed.