by Sylviane Gold
view review on NYTimes.com
What’s playing at the Goodspeed? I’ll tell you what’s playing at the Goodspeed. Story of a high-rolling gambler who wins way more than he bargained for when a mission doll upsets his game. Yes, Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown are back, along with their pals Nathan Detroit, Miss Adelaide (don’t call her Ms.!) and the whole gang of charming lowlifes who inhabit the Broadway of “Guys and Dolls.”
Of course, it’s really the Broadway of Damon Runyon, the newspaperman who over the first four decades of the last century invented a panoply of mugs and lugs, dames and broads, and an exquisitely highfalutin dialect of New York English. There are about 20 movies based on his stories, but his eternal fame rests on the two stories that provided the composer Frank Loesser and the book writers Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows with the material for the 1950 musical “Guys and Dolls.”
There are many students of the form who proclaim “Guys and Dolls” the best musical comedy ever, and they may well be right. It has the requisite romances — a soaringly lyrical one and a cleverly zany one — and enough witty skirmishing between heroes and anti-heroes, horseplayers and preachers. Together they lift an audience into that supernal realm where singing and dancing replace ordinary modes of expression and rapture rules.
This is, of course, meat and potatoes for Goodspeed Musicals, in East Haddam. For Don Stephenson, who directed this fine and funny production, it’s almost mother’s milk. A former performer, he is married to Mr. Loesser’s daughter Emily. And Goodspeed’s new executive director, Michael Gennaro, is the son of the Broadway dancer and choreographer Peter Gennaro, who performed in the original “Guys and Dolls.” Little wonder that they have overseen a production mounted with the love and care bestowed on a family heirloom.
You know you’re in good hands even before the show starts, as two rough-hewed voices reeking of New Yawk street life ask that you turn off your cellphone — you know, those gadgets meant for use in your jail cell. (The line producer, Donna Lynn Hilton, is responsible for this entertaining bit.) And as the curtain rises, you’re transported to a neon-lit evocation of 1950s Times Square, installed on the Goodspeed Opera House stage by the set designer Paul Tate dePoo III. He has resurrected not just the smoke-spewing billboard for Camel cigarettes but other long-gone or never-were landmarks, like the Roxy, the Orpheum, Mindy’s and, of course, the Hot Box, where Miss Adelaide and her bevy of slinky chorines entertain nightly, wearing Tracy Christensen’s naughty, skimpy costumes and flirting happily with the customers. (In fact, the costumes throughout are outstanding, whether the scarlet uniforms at the Save-A-Soul Mission or the sharp plaids and pinstripes for the cardsharps and mobsters.)
Alex Sanchez has provided the dolls with raunchy little dance routines meant to burlesque burlesque, in keeping with Mr. Loesser’s tuneful song parodies “A Bushel and a Peck” and “Take Back Your Mink.” But Mr. Sanchez’s best choreography, at once smooth and punchy, is reserved for the guys. In the action-packed “Crapshooters’ Dance,” the gamblers that Nathan has barricaded in a sewer tunnel slide and tumble and leap across the stage.
The musical’s opening street scene, which includes both guys and dolls and establishes the show’s shady, disreputable milieu, is a dynamic parade of Broadway chiselers, wide-eyed tourists and down-and-outers, portrayed by Mr. Sanchez’s crackerjack dance ensemble. Their splay-legged jumps and arm-waving gyrations recall the choreography of a Keystone Kops comedy — one packed with Kops who went to ballet school.
My favorite scammers are the respectable-looking couple pushing a baby carriage until a likely-looking victim happens by, at which point they rip off their disguises and set up a shell game on the rim of the pram. Stephen Terry’s lighting keeps all the action, night and day, legible.
The dance numbers stand out here, but the singing, as always at Goodspeed, is superb. And the score’s emotional centerpiece, “More I Cannot Wish You,” gets a definitive performance from John Jellison, as Sarah’s wise, loving grandfather Arvide. The role often goes to an avuncular old-timer, but Mr. Jellison’s beautifully sung, nuanced Arvide surpasses every portrayal I’ve seen.
Nancy Anderson gleefully plays the long-suffering, adenoidally challenged Adelaide, still waiting for Nathan to make good on his 14-year-old promise to marry her. And Manna Nichols makes a demure, gorgeous-voiced Sarah.
However, some of the other acting choices seem a little off the mark.
Mark Price, trying a bit too hard to be adorable, gives Nathan a squeaky, infantile voice; and Tony Roach’s handsome, well-sung Sky is almost too wholesome, missing some of the louche appeal that makes him so irresistible to buttoned-up Sarah. But their duet, “I’ll Know,” is still as persuasive a piece of singing as you could hope to hear in a Broadway romance, fly-by-night or otherwise. Michael O’Flaherty does his usual stellar job in the pit. If I were a bell, I’d be ringing.
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