The history of adapting Damon Runyon’s story collection, Guys and Dolls, for the stage is as full of twists and turns as the musical itself. Example: the producers went through two writers before landing on their third choice, Abe Burrows. His predecessors had each been deemed not funny enough, but Burrows was warned not to be too funny by librettist Frank Loesser, who had already written most of the show’s songs. Though confident of the comic punch of his lyrics, was Loesser feeling protective of the tenderness that infuses so many of them? And if the songs preceded the script for Guys and Dolls, doesn’t that suggest its characters were determined less by the causes and consequences of a plot clicking along in time than by the scored poetry that leaps time altogether?
The captivating production of Guys and Dolls onstage until November in the Bowmer Theatre seems to answer both these questions with a resounding yes. Provided with the stories’ colorful gangster lingo, Daniel Pelzig’s seamless choreography in which dance comes as naturally as breath, and Daniel Ostling’s set design, which keeps recreating itself before our eyes, director Mary Zimmerman conjures a fantastic Runyonland, worthy of denizens who were baring their souls in song before they could talk and walk.
The action swirls around two pairs of lovers. Sky Masterson (Jeremy Peter Johnson) is a gambler’s gambler, whose heart mismatches him with a soldier of God, Sarah Brown (Kate Hurster). She was merely a pawn at first in a classic guys’ wager: Sky’s friend Nathan Detroit (Rodney Gardiner) needed money to secure a site for his craps game and bet he could identify a woman Sky could not seduce. Sarah happened along with her Salvation Army band at just that moment, her brow pinched with longing, not for one man but for many: to fill the seats at an upcoming prayer meeting. After she and Sky disavow in song their mutual attraction, she agrees to fly to Havana with him in exchange for twelve warm bodies showing up at her Save-A-Soul mission.
Meanwhile, Nathan is in perpetual retreat from his “well-known fiancée” of fourteen years, the stripper Adelaide (Robin Goodrin Nordli). These two may have more in common than Sky and Sarah, but their physical mismatch underscores perhaps the tendency of love to snub classifications: Nathan is small, dark, and agile while the tall, blond Adelaide is endearingly awkward. She’s been after him to give up the craps game for years, and once again she extracts a promise for him to break.
Adelaide punishes Nathan with an amusing charade of estrangement, but Sarah’s rejection of Sky when she discovers the bet is more serious. Here is a young lady whose original dream required marriage to a staid banker. It will take the lullaby “More I Cannot Wish You” from her grandfather Arvide to awaken her to her true desires. Exquisitely rendered by Richard Howard, the song comes as a surprise from this aging missionary, with its reference to a lover’s lusty “lickerish tooth” endorsing the passion that Sarah is trying rigidly to deny.
The penultimate duet “Marry the Man Today” offers Sarah and Adelaide an opportunity to bond and bolster each other against the problematic unions they’re contemplating. Through most of the play, they have been consigned to separate, almost competitive tracks according to type—stripper with the heart of gold and repressed church lady. Nordli breathes juicy, nuanced life into her role, from her convincing struggle with her respiratory tract to the domestic fantasy she spins for her mother. Against a lesser Sarah, she might have stolen the show. But in her parallel universe, Hurster has gradually unclenched, her defenses loosened by curiosity and desire. As Act One winds down in Havana, her drunken dissolution produces a mesmerizing dance of self-implosion. Adelaide’s flagrant strip number that opens the second act, “Take Back your Mink,” reads as its perfect flip side. Uniting these two women at the end sets up hope of their evolution beyond the spurious notion that they can reform their future husbands.
As for the guys, well, there’s an impressive gang of them, sporting Mara Blumenfeld’s jazzy suits, and living up to lugubrious names like Angie, the Ox and Big Jule. Though he’s Mr. Cool around them, Johnson’s likable Sky manages to convey hints of a man whose DNA carries the sweet humility of “I’ve Never Been in Love Before.” The success of his relationship to Lady Luck is near mythic, but when his heart opens to a flesh-and-blood woman, he realizes what he’s missed. Gardiner’s expressive Nathan seems increasingly aware that “Old Reliable Nathan” is really a frantic clown, bouncing between underworld thugs and the police.
Zimmerman’s Guys and Dolls begins with an overture of choreographed chaos—bodies careening around Times Square, nearly colliding, running different patterns until finally they sort themselves into gamblers and missionaries—low-lifes and lofty lives, criminals and would-be saints. By the finale, the dichotomy has blurred. All four main characters have been true to their musical origins and embraced love. With it come weddings, commitment. Will Sky, aka Obadiah, be content pounding a Salvation Army drum by Sarah’s side? Can Sarah open her religious proselytizing to life’s paradoxes and ambiguities? Can Nathan exchange a “permanently floating” craps game for the plain old permanence of marriage, outlaws for in-laws? And Adelaide, so habituated to wanting what she couldn’t have—Nathan as a husband—how long will she be satisfied with her “wallpaper and bookends”?
How lovely not to have to answer these questions about characters born in the dreamy realms of song.
Molly Tinsley taught literature and creative writing at the U. S. Naval Academy for twenty years. Her latest book is the spy thriller Broken Angels.
