Goys and Dills, or "You don't have to be Jewish to do 'Guys and Dolls' right -- but it helps"

Benny Southstreet is NOT supposed to steal "Fugue for Tinhorns" away from Nicely-Nicely Johnson

Yesterday afternoon I had the privilege of accompanying the official B@B Broadway Zen Master, ModFab, to the last preview matinee of the new Des McAnuff-helmed revival of Guys and Dolls. It's a mark of the state of Broadway today that the Great White Way has decided that a million high school drama clubs can't be wrong, and that Frank Loesser's musical masterpiece is as close to a sure thing as you're going to get this year. That certainty isn't based on the idea of packing the cast with the kind of movie-audience-bait stars on which Broadway seems to rely these days, because other than Lauren Graham, the MILF from The Gilmore Girls, you have to be either a Broadway buff or an aficionado of indie character actors to recognize the rest of the cast. But I would guess that one in five Americans has either at one time or another been at least peripherally associated with one of the tens of thousands of school and amateur productions of Guys and Dolls, or has seen the terrific 1992 revival in which Nathan Lane put Frank Sinatra's Nathan Detroit out of its miscast misery forever and Faith Prince snatched the role of Adelaide away from Vivian Blaine forever.

Not even a generation has passed since Broadway last saw a revival of this show, and perhaps it's just too soon for another one, because even though they're nowhere to be seen, Nathan Lane and Faith Prince hang over this production the way the ghost of Ronald Reagan haunts the lost Republican Party. It isn't that this production is bad; after all, if tens of thousands of middle and high schools can't ruin this show, it just isn't wreckable.

But when you're planning to sell tickets at over a hundred bucks a pop, you don't want to have people like me, with seventeen-year-old memories of the last revival, and worse, 35-year-old memories of their own high school productions still fresh, shaking their heads and thinking, "No...NO! 'Nu?' is not supposed to be SUNG! It's Yiddish, dammit! Let Nathan and Faith show you how it's done..."

Oh, this production is pleasant enough, but it doesn't sing the way it's supposed to. I thought the ongepotchket neon signs all over the theatre were stolen from Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme of a few years ago, but ModFab tells me that almost identical signage can be seen ten blocks uptown at the August Wilson Theatre, where McAnuff's other show, Jersey Boys, is still playing. He says McAnuff is in love with scenery rather than actors, and in this production it shows. For some reason, the show is moved back in time to the 1930's milieu of Damon Runyon's original stories, which does give the show a certain depressing, and I hope unintentional, timeliness, but it also allows McAnuff to do things with giant hulking pieces of Art Deco buildings that look like extra pieces left over from Tim Burton's Gotham City -- a kind of Depression-era Stonehenge. Some of it is effective, but there's only so much you can do with a revolving door, and the sheer size of these pieces doesn't give the actors much room to breathe.

I had thought Oliver Platt to be an inspired piece of casting as Nathan Detroit, but he just doesn't know what to do with this role -- an astounding idea, given how hard it is to imagine any working actor not having been in one of those many high school productions of this show. I'm not old enough to have seen Sam Levene in this role, but I've heard the original soundtrack from 1955, and Platt is more like what I imagine Levene must have been -- a kind of rumpled, sad sack ne'er-do-well instead of the cartoon that Nathan Lane wrought in 1992. This is all well and good, but Platt doesn't have the comic chops to time his character's best lines properly, and throws away what makes this character appealing, leaving just a fat, unpleasant, zhlub for whom you can't imagine a sparkly creature like Lauren Graham waiting fourteen years.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Lauren Graham as Adelaide, though even though she's older than Faith Prince was in 1992, still looks too girlish, and therefore lacks the kind of aging-bimbo pathos that Faith Prince brought to the role. She's cute as a button, she sings reasonably well and looks to be having far too good a time to be the unhappy and frustrated "well-known fiancée".

Craig Bierko is a somewhat smarmy Sky Masterson, which I found a refreshing take on what is often a thankless, colorless leading-man role, but Kate Jennings Grant, with a distracting facial resemblance to Kristin Scott-Thomas, is somewhat colorless in the often thankless ingenue role as Sarah Brown. The Sky/Sarah romance has always seemed to me to be the least interesting and fun part of Guys and Dolls, seemingly having walked in from something by Rogers and Hammerstein, and while neither of this pair sets the stage on fire, they're certainly adequate, and Bierko's "Jake Gyllenhaal by way of Andrew Dice Clay" mannerisms take on Masterson feels fresher than just about anything else here.

The head-scratching thing about Guys and Dolls is that composer and lyricist Frank Loesser doesn't give the best songs to any of the four leads. I know this is the "hum the songs on the way out of the theatre" show to end all "hum the songs on the way out of the theatre" shows, with one great song after another (and unfortunately, the unsingable "My Time of Day" plunked right down like a giant honking turd right in the middle). But it's the Fifth Banana role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson who not only has most of the show's funniest lines, but also the best songs. So it was a little odd to see this show's Nicely, Tituss Burgess, swallowing his vocals in "Fugue for Tinhorns" and the first half of the "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat". Burgess clearly doesn't feel the whole Runyon thing, and at times his performance veered dangerously close to eye-rolling Chris Tuckerish broad racial stereotype. But when he opens up his pipes in the second half of the Big Showstopper (its gospel influence finally brought out from under the table), you wonder where the hell this guy has been for the last two hours.

Far better among the guys is Steve Rosen, who as his name would indicate, understands the undercurrent of Yiddish theatre that pervades Abe Burrows' book and in perhaps a first, it's he who "fronts" the aforementioned "Fugue for Tinhorns", which for my money is the best damn opening song in Broadway history. But for sheer scene-stealing goodness, you can't beat the spectacular Mary Testa, who carries the entire stage on her shoulders as the formidable General Cartwright. I always have a soft spot for the women who play this role, because this was the role I was "stuck" with as a snarky misfit teenager who could never appreciate how much more fun the battle-axe roles are than the sexpot or ingenue roles I coveted at the time. But as good as Testa is in her few scenes, and as hilarious and utterly Runyonesque as Rosen is, they can't compensate for the show's glum leading man, its hulking sets, and amateurish choreography by Sergio Trujillo, which put breakdance moves in a 1930's setting and made the dance numbers seem endless when they should be energizing.

But in the end it's Guys and Dolls, so how bad can it be? The question is whether it's worth a hundred bucks a pop, and the answer is that you might be better served by going to YouTube, typing in the show's title, and checking out some of the charming excerpts from the many amateur productions of this show produced every year. Like this one:

Or, you could do what Mr. Brilliant and I are doing next weekend, and support Broadway by taking in Avenue Q again. Or you could take in ModFab's latest production, Not Her (and other exiles on March 10 and 11 at Dixon Place.

(UPDATE: In keeping with the title of this review, Benjamin Ivry in the Forward has a must-read perspective, with a title I wish I'd thought of, for all GAD-ophiles on the snark behind Frank Loesser's music, and on the Jewishness of the Runyon milieu.)