Hell hath no fury like a fan disappointed. Consider everything that follows in light of this: Guys and Dolls is my absolute, no-contest, utterly favorite musical. It was the first show I ever saw, and I grew up lip-synching to the original Broadway soundtrack. I saw (and adored) the all-black version starring Robert Guillaume as well as the more recent revival with Nathan Lane and Faith Prince. "Guys and Dolls" is practically a sacred text to me, and I'd be the first to admit that this makes me a harsher critic of its performance than I might otherwise be.
Having said all of which: Court Theatre's "Guys and Dolls" is a plodding, pedantic, ill-conceived disgrace.
The theater's publicity trumpets "Classics Like You've Never Seen Them Before." The problem is that some classics should be seen in the form that made them classic. Musicals are particularly vulnerable to mis-handling, as anyone who's ever seen a high school "Fiddler on the Roof" can attest. So there was reason to be concerned when Court Theatre belatedly recognized that a musical might be a classic. (This recognition was delayed by a quirk of the theater's history: its founding director despised musicals, publicly deriding them as "what the simple folk do.") Sure enough, the Court production of "My Fair Lady" (though widely lauded) nearly sank under director Gary Griffin's determination to restore Shavian social commentary deliberately eliminated by Lerner and Loewe. And the conceptual mistake recurs here, as director Charles Newell overwhelms the show's charm with oppressive intimations of religiosity and Brechtian squalor.
Assuming though for the sake of argument that reinvention was necessary or desirable, there must be something more to it than making things take forever. But just as Griffin chose to have "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" done as a lament and "I'm Getting Married in the Morning" as a dirge, Newell presents striptease numbers that are nearly in slow motion, and "Sit Down You're Rockin' The Boat" at 16 rpm. The desire to sloooooow evvvvverything doooooown extends to the dialogue, though the adjective most often applied to Damon Runyon dialogue is "rapid-fire." The result is a leaden evening, one whose concept defeats its actors.
They deserve better. When Susan Moniz as Sarah Brown does "If I Were A Bell" at full tempo and in full voice, she nearly blows the roof off the theater with her transformation from priggish Salvation Army officer to amorous babe. Moniz and Heidi Kettenring's Miss Adelaide shine in "Marry the Man Today" because they're permitted to sing it at the proper speed, while it's tough to decide who is more embarrassed by Adelaide's lethargic "Take Back Your Mink," the actress or the audience. As Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Jeff Dumas finally gets to show what he can do during the third verse of "Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat," when Newell and music director Doug Peck finally get out of his way and let him sing the piece as written. Til then, he and his choral fellows are condemned to Gregorian-chant the words of the best gospel song ever written by a white man, one so explosively joyous that in most productions it literally stops the show.
Even Scott Parkinson's considerable acting ability can't overcome his miscasting as Nathan Detroit: he's practically albino when Nathan is clearly supposed to be either Jewish or Italian; he looks lean and hungry instead of skinny and nervous; and he can't really sing. If he could, though, that wouldn't have been sufficient to salvage "Sue Me," which is done as though he really expected his long-time fiancee to "shoot bullets through me." David New, though born to play Sky Masterson-handsome, charming, devil-may-care-can do nothing about the fact that he's instructed to sing "Luck Be A Lady" as though it were a hymn and "I've Never Been In Love Before" as an expression of regret instead of a celebration of new-found love.
There's no point in beating this to death: the word 'lugubrious' should never apply to "Guys and Dolls". There must be a difference between reinventing a classic and mugging it.
Another critic adored this version, calling it a true drama of religious transformation and admiring its Brechtian allusions, given that Brecht's "Happy Ending" was inspired by Runyon. But this over-intellectualized response is precisely the wrong one for a show like this. "Guys and Dolls" is NOT a drama of religious transformation: it's an evening of tuneful comedy, or at least it's supposed to be. We've never seen classics like this before because everyone else has had the good sense not to do them this way.