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hesMarch 2, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | 'GUYS AND DOLLS'
It's a Cinch That the Bum Is Under the Thumb of Some Little Broad
By BEN BRANTLEY
Certain words, in certain contexts, are best left unspoken. In Des McAnuff’s uninspired new revival of “Guys and Dolls” at the Nederlander Theater that word happens to be “chemistry.” It is dropped — with a thud and a shatter — and hovers for the rest of the evening like a neon-lighted reproach.
“Chemistry?” says Sarah Brown (Kate Jennings Grant), the rigid Salvation Army officer, with a dropped jaw and you’ve-gotta-be-kidding italics. She has just been told, by the handsome gambler Sky Masterson (Craig Bierko), that love is something that can’t be planned or anticipated. Miss Brown is having none of this radical concept.
Oh, Sarah, Sarah, I do so know where you’re coming from. Chemistry is something you don’t understand until you experience it, with all the attendant happy chills and dizziness. And, honey, there ain’t no chemistry in your show: not between the two pairs of leading lovers, or between the singers and their songs, or the actors and their parts.
Whatever special substance it is that makes old shows feel new-born and artificial musicals ring truer than life, this “Guys and Dolls” left it behind in the laboratory. Instead this production, which opened Sunday and also stars Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham, provides a valuable lesson in the importance of chemistry by demonstrating what can happen without it — even to a show as seemingly foolproof as “Guys and Dolls.” With grade-A songs by Frank Loesser and a book by Abe Burrows (who officially shares credit with Jo Swerling), this 1950 classic is widely regarded as the paradigm for a well-made musical comedy. (It is regularly revived, most recently on Broadway in 1992, and the 1955 film, starring Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, often shows up on television.)
It’s not as if Mr. McAnuff and company have failed to provide most of the traditional ingredients for a rousing production of “Guys and Dolls,” adapted from Damon Runyon’s stories about wise-guy gamblers in love along the Main Stem of Manhattan. Conspicuously at hand are those loud, eye-searing suits, symphonies in bright plaids and checks (designed by Paul Tazewell); a neon-sign-splashed set (by Robert Brill, with lighting by Howell Binkley and video design by Dustin O’Neill) that summons a few busy blocks of Midtown in the 1930s, used by the characters as office, living room and trysting place; and of course a skilled orchestra to capture the brassy bliss of Loesser’s eternally infectious score.
Mr. McAnuff, who directed the Broadway smash “Jersey Boys,” has also clearly worked hard at creating a sense of unending urban flux. He has extended the playing area to include what is normally the orchestra pit and some box seats, so that ensemble members keep materializing not just from the wings but from below and above eye level too. And he and his choreographer, Sergio Trujillo, sure keep these folks in motion: running, bumping and grinding, back-flipping, somersaulting.
How bizarre, then, that the show feels so static, as if paralyzed by self-consciousness. Nearly all the performers — from stars to chorus — approach their roles eagerly but diffidently, as if they would like to get to know the characters they play but are afraid of being rejected. Such tentativeness creates the impression of an entire cast of understudies, who have the technical qualifications for their parts but no natural affinity.
This means that the sui generis style of communication known as Runyonese — a mix of courtly formality, tough-guy vernacular and pretzel-shape sentences — is spoken here as if it were a second language, dotted with implicit question marks that seem to ask, “Am I getting this right?” (Nathan Detroit’s key henchmen, played by Tituss Burgess and Steve Rosen, have such disconcertingly different deliveries of this lingo, it’s as if they’ve been spliced into the same frame from movies of different periods.)
A similar uncertainty pervades the comic timing, and you can sense even hard-core Broadway pros like Mary Testa (in a small part as a Salvation Army general) trying on different inflections and rhythms in the course of a single bit of dialogue. As Nathan, an anxious entrepreneur of craps games, Mr. Platt seems uncomfortable in ways that go beyond his truth-averse character’s fears of being found out by the law or by his fiancée of 14 years, the wistful stripper Miss Adelaide (Ms. Graham).
Though he has shown himself to be a wonderful and surprising actor onstage (“Shining City”) and television (“Huff,” “The West Wing”), Mr. Platt never finds a sustained pattern of idiosyncrasies that would let him connect with Nathan (and the audience). His singing voice is agreeable, small but smooth, but it does not define a character. His hands often glued to the sides of his jacket, he has the stricken, nauseated expression of someone terrified of being fingered as an impostor.
A similar stiffness inhibits all the major performances. As Miss Adelaide, Ms. Graham (of “Gilmore Girls” on television) has a stentorian, on-key singing voice and an amiable presence. But when she delivers the fabled “Adelaide’s Lament,” standing straight up like a school valedictorian, it’s devoid of original poi-son-ality. Ms. Grant, an able vocalist with great cheekbones, exudes a take-charge competence and confidence that are at odds with the vulnerability of the virginal Sarah.
As Sky the heartbreaker, Mr. Bierko (who starred in the 2000 revival of “The Music Man”) gives the smoothest performance, but it’s also bland. Like the others he sometimes seems to disappear while you’re watching him. And all the stars are undercut by staging that has them crooning love duets in rigid profile, as if they were singing daguerreotypes.
This is especially disheartening, since few musicals provide the chances afforded by “Guys and Dolls” for performers to create (and reinvent) big and full characters, eye-catching cartoons that turn out to have human hearts. Much of what made Jerry Zaks’s 1992 revival so heavenly was the quirky credibility of its stars, especially Faith Prince, who found the key to Miss Adelaide as much in the stripper’s bone-deep tiredness as in her celebrated sniffles and coughs.
Though this production mostly sticks to the original script, it has introduced one significant addition. That’s the silent presence of Damon Runyon himself (Raymond Del Barrio), who appears at the show’s beginning and end at his typewriter, and periodically pops up to observe the folks onstage. There is even a danced prologue called “Runyonland,” with the writer overseeing a Mack Sennett-style series of cops, robbers and lovers chasing one another.
This interpolated material has the effect of putting a distancing frame around everything that follows. The emphasis is on concept over character, a fatal mistake with “Guys and Dolls.” No wonder everybody looks so ill at ease. They’ve been straitjacketed by quotation marks.
GUYS AND DOLLS
Music and lyrics by Frank Loesser; book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows based on a story and characters of Damon Runyon; directed by Des McAnuff; choreography by Sergio Trujillo; music direction, vocal arrangements and incidental music by Ted Sperling; sets by Robert Brill; costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Howell Binkley; sound by Steve Canyon Kennedy; video design by Dustin O’Neill; hair and wig design by Charles LaPointe; fight director, Steve Rankin; orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin; dance arrangements by James Lynn Abbott; music coordinator, Michael Keller; technical supervisor, Don S. Gilmore; production stage manager, Frank Hartenstein; general management, Alchemy Production Group/Carl Pasbjerg and Frank Scardino; associate producers, Jill Lenhart and Peter Godfrey; executive producer, David Lazar. Presented by Howard Panter and Ambassador Theater Group, Tulchin/Bartner, Bill Kenwright, Northwater Entertainment, Darren Bagert, Tom Gregory, Nederlander Presentations Inc., David Mirvish, Michael Jenkins/Dallas Summer Musicals, Independent Presenters Network, Olympus Theatricals and Sonia Friedman Productions. At the Nederlander Theater, 208 West 41st Street, Manhattan; (212) 307-4100. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.
WITH: Oliver Platt (Nathan Detroit), Lauren Graham (Adelaide), Craig Bierko (Sky Masterson), Kate Jennings Grant (Sarah Brown), Tituss Burgess (Nicely-Nicely Johnson), Glenn Fleshler (Big Jule), Adam Lefevre (Lieutentant Brannigan), Jim Ortlieb (Arvide Abernathy), Steve Rosen (Benny Southstreet), Mary Testa (General Cartwright) and Raymond Del Barrio (Damon).
THEATER REVIEW | 'GUYS AND DOLLS'
It's a Cinch That the Bum Is Under the Thumb of Some Little Broad
By BEN BRANTLEY
Certain words, in certain contexts, are best left unspoken. In Des McAnuff’s uninspired new revival of “Guys and Dolls” at the Nederlander Theater that word happens to be “chemistry.” It is dropped — with a thud and a shatter — and hovers for the rest of the evening like a neon-lighted reproach.
“Chemistry?” says Sarah Brown (Kate Jennings Grant), the rigid Salvation Army officer, with a dropped jaw and you’ve-gotta-be-kidding italics. She has just been told, by the handsome gambler Sky Masterson (Craig Bierko), that love is something that can’t be planned or anticipated. Miss Brown is having none of this radical concept.
Oh, Sarah, Sarah, I do so know where you’re coming from. Chemistry is something you don’t understand until you experience it, with all the attendant happy chills and dizziness. And, honey, there ain’t no chemistry in your show: not between the two pairs of leading lovers, or between the singers and their songs, or the actors and their parts.
Whatever special substance it is that makes old shows feel new-born and artificial musicals ring truer than life, this “Guys and Dolls” left it behind in the laboratory. Instead this production, which opened Sunday and also stars Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham, provides a valuable lesson in the importance of chemistry by demonstrating what can happen without it — even to a show as seemingly foolproof as “Guys and Dolls.” With grade-A songs by Frank Loesser and a book by Abe Burrows (who officially shares credit with Jo Swerling), this 1950 classic is widely regarded as the paradigm for a well-made musical comedy. (It is regularly revived, most recently on Broadway in 1992, and the 1955 film, starring Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, often shows up on television.)
It’s not as if Mr. McAnuff and company have failed to provide most of the traditional ingredients for a rousing production of “Guys and Dolls,” adapted from Damon Runyon’s stories about wise-guy gamblers in love along the Main Stem of Manhattan. Conspicuously at hand are those loud, eye-searing suits, symphonies in bright plaids and checks (designed by Paul Tazewell); a neon-sign-splashed set (by Robert Brill, with lighting by Howell Binkley and video design by Dustin O’Neill) that summons a few busy blocks of Midtown in the 1930s, used by the characters as office, living room and trysting place; and of course a skilled orchestra to capture the brassy bliss of Loesser’s eternally infectious score.
Mr. McAnuff, who directed the Broadway smash “Jersey Boys,” has also clearly worked hard at creating a sense of unending urban flux. He has extended the playing area to include what is normally the orchestra pit and some box seats, so that ensemble members keep materializing not just from the wings but from below and above eye level too. And he and his choreographer, Sergio Trujillo, sure keep these folks in motion: running, bumping and grinding, back-flipping, somersaulting.
How bizarre, then, that the show feels so static, as if paralyzed by self-consciousness. Nearly all the performers — from stars to chorus — approach their roles eagerly but diffidently, as if they would like to get to know the characters they play but are afraid of being rejected. Such tentativeness creates the impression of an entire cast of understudies, who have the technical qualifications for their parts but no natural affinity.
This means that the sui generis style of communication known as Runyonese — a mix of courtly formality, tough-guy vernacular and pretzel-shape sentences — is spoken here as if it were a second language, dotted with implicit question marks that seem to ask, “Am I getting this right?” (Nathan Detroit’s key henchmen, played by Tituss Burgess and Steve Rosen, have such disconcertingly different deliveries of this lingo, it’s as if they’ve been spliced into the same frame from movies of different periods.)
A similar uncertainty pervades the comic timing, and you can sense even hard-core Broadway pros like Mary Testa (in a small part as a Salvation Army general) trying on different inflections and rhythms in the course of a single bit of dialogue. As Nathan, an anxious entrepreneur of craps games, Mr. Platt seems uncomfortable in ways that go beyond his truth-averse character’s fears of being found out by the law or by his fiancée of 14 years, the wistful stripper Miss Adelaide (Ms. Graham).
Though he has shown himself to be a wonderful and surprising actor onstage (“Shining City”) and television (“Huff,” “The West Wing”), Mr. Platt never finds a sustained pattern of idiosyncrasies that would let him connect with Nathan (and the audience). His singing voice is agreeable, small but smooth, but it does not define a character. His hands often glued to the sides of his jacket, he has the stricken, nauseated expression of someone terrified of being fingered as an impostor.
A similar stiffness inhibits all the major performances. As Miss Adelaide, Ms. Graham (of “Gilmore Girls” on television) has a stentorian, on-key singing voice and an amiable presence. But when she delivers the fabled “Adelaide’s Lament,” standing straight up like a school valedictorian, it’s devoid of original poi-son-ality. Ms. Grant, an able vocalist with great cheekbones, exudes a take-charge competence and confidence that are at odds with the vulnerability of the virginal Sarah.
As Sky the heartbreaker, Mr. Bierko (who starred in the 2000 revival of “The Music Man”) gives the smoothest performance, but it’s also bland. Like the others he sometimes seems to disappear while you’re watching him. And all the stars are undercut by staging that has them crooning love duets in rigid profile, as if they were singing daguerreotypes.
This is especially disheartening, since few musicals provide the chances afforded by “Guys and Dolls” for performers to create (and reinvent) big and full characters, eye-catching cartoons that turn out to have human hearts. Much of what made Jerry Zaks’s 1992 revival so heavenly was the quirky credibility of its stars, especially Faith Prince, who found the key to Miss Adelaide as much in the stripper’s bone-deep tiredness as in her celebrated sniffles and coughs.
Though this production mostly sticks to the original script, it has introduced one significant addition. That’s the silent presence of Damon Runyon himself (Raymond Del Barrio), who appears at the show’s beginning and end at his typewriter, and periodically pops up to observe the folks onstage. There is even a danced prologue called “Runyonland,” with the writer overseeing a Mack Sennett-style series of cops, robbers and lovers chasing one another.
This interpolated material has the effect of putting a distancing frame around everything that follows. The emphasis is on concept over character, a fatal mistake with “Guys and Dolls.” No wonder everybody looks so ill at ease. They’ve been straitjacketed by quotation marks.
GUYS AND DOLLS
Music and lyrics by Frank Loesser; book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows based on a story and characters of Damon Runyon; directed by Des McAnuff; choreography by Sergio Trujillo; music direction, vocal arrangements and incidental music by Ted Sperling; sets by Robert Brill; costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Howell Binkley; sound by Steve Canyon Kennedy; video design by Dustin O’Neill; hair and wig design by Charles LaPointe; fight director, Steve Rankin; orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin; dance arrangements by James Lynn Abbott; music coordinator, Michael Keller; technical supervisor, Don S. Gilmore; production stage manager, Frank Hartenstein; general management, Alchemy Production Group/Carl Pasbjerg and Frank Scardino; associate producers, Jill Lenhart and Peter Godfrey; executive producer, David Lazar. Presented by Howard Panter and Ambassador Theater Group, Tulchin/Bartner, Bill Kenwright, Northwater Entertainment, Darren Bagert, Tom Gregory, Nederlander Presentations Inc., David Mirvish, Michael Jenkins/Dallas Summer Musicals, Independent Presenters Network, Olympus Theatricals and Sonia Friedman Productions. At the Nederlander Theater, 208 West 41st Street, Manhattan; (212) 307-4100. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.
WITH: Oliver Platt (Nathan Detroit), Lauren Graham (Adelaide), Craig Bierko (Sky Masterson), Kate Jennings Grant (Sarah Brown), Tituss Burgess (Nicely-Nicely Johnson), Glenn Fleshler (Big Jule), Adam Lefevre (Lieutentant Brannigan), Jim Ortlieb (Arvide Abernathy), Steve Rosen (Benny Southstreet), Mary Testa (General Cartwright) and Raymond Del Barrio (Damon).