Guys, Dolls and Other Hot Tickets

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

EVERY NIGHT BUT SUNDAY, when the stage inside is dark, the street fronting Broadway's Martin Beck Theater is a honking gridlock of limousines -- a shimmering illusion of Manhattan privilege come to life on pavements only steps away from the domain of panhandlers, pickpockets and prostitutes. There is no more characteristic New York City phenomenon than a Broadway hit in the early days of its run, when popular impact is measured by the number of people who are conscious that they haven't seen it yet. In all Broadway history, no hit has been more distinctively New Yorkish than the show gloriously revived at the Beck, Guys and Dolls, a self-proclaimed "fable" that romanticizes * hoods and hustlers, touts and troublemakers, into cuddlesome comic delights. It turns mean streets, back alleys, even subway tunnels into twinkly urban oases of robust energy and delight.

Fittingly, in a season when the Great White Way once again has an inner glow, this most Broadwayesque of musicals leads the way. It has been a season of powerhouse new plays by August Wilson, Herb Gardner, Neil Simon, Brian Friel and Richard Nelson. It has been a season of movie- and TV-star glitter -- Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin and Amy Madigan in A Streetcar Named Desire; Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss in Ariel Dorfman's politically inflamed Death and the Maiden; fast-rising Larry Fishburne, direct from the angry film Boyz N the Hood to Wilson's wistful Two Trains Running; Judd Hirsch; Alan Alda; Jane Alexander; Raul Julia; Gregory Hines. It has been a season of bountiful musicals -- Crazy for You for Gershwin nostalgia, Jelly's Last Jam for show-business angst and racial relevance, Falsettos for AIDS poignancy and artistic perfection, Man of La Mancha and The Most Happy Fella for old times' sake.

But if this is the year when long-battered Broadway takes heart again, the show that symbolizes and crystallizes its comeback is Frank Loesser's funny valentine to Gotham. In 1950, when the musical form was still in its heyday, Guys and Dolls set the town on its ear. Critic John McClain of the New York Journal-American said the show might be just as good as Oklahoma! or South Pacific, but more important, he added, "This is the medium of our town -- not the tall corn or the waving palms." In 1992 its second coming was even more ballyhooed, from the front page of the New York Times to the cover of New York magazine and even network TV. For the first time in years, the most coveted ticket is not to one of the big British musicals that disgruntled Yanks term "the chandelier show," "the helicopter show," "the barricades show" and "the felines show" (Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Les Miserables, Cats). Local sages have credited Guys and Dolls with a role in everything from reviving musical comedy and Broadway as a whole to renewing public faith in the city and its mayor. In these extravagant formulations, Guys and Dolls is more than a hit -- it's a myth.

What is actually onstage is a glorious eruption of color and comedy and confidence. Like the phalanx of limousines outside, it celebrates New York as the city longs to see itself -- stylish, street-smart, sophisticated, ; successful and, in comparison with Los Angeles, blessedly serene. For celebrities, Guys and Dolls has become a must-see. Last week Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were there; the week before, it was Garry Trudeau and Jane Pauley. NBC correspondent and best-selling author Betty Rollin had to settle for standing room while reporting a story. Yet what gives the show an advance sale of $5 million, astonishing for a revival without marquee-value stars, is its appeal to ordinary New Yorkers, like the dozens from a Long Island temple who gathered last week for a cast reunion of their staging a decade ago -- and remembered the script well enough to mouth most of the words.

No American musical ever had a better book or funnier and more truthful lyrics, and few had so many catchy, jubilant tunes in one score. Only a handful have mined a literary vein as rich as Damon Runyon's wry stories that transmuted thugs into thinkers and louts into Lochinvars, and elevated their gutter parlance into a courtly elocution, full of flowery phrases scrupulously shorn of contractions. While time has been unkind to many landmark musicals, Guys and Dolls has sustained its glowing reputation despite a clumsy 1955 Hollywood rendition with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra and a trendy, swingy all-black revival on Broadway in 1977.

After Britain's National Theater triumphed in the early '80s with a more faithful version emphasizing neon glow and urban grit, interest surged in another Broadway revival, this time by the book. A discreet bidding war ensued for the approval of Loesser's widow, actress Jo Sullivan, who holds key copyrights and has firm opinions about every detail of staging, from the flutter of a hand to the color of a necktie. The winner: a partnership, calling itself the Dodgers, that had produced noteworthy new musicals (Big River, The Secret Garden) but never a revival.

Fortunately for everyone, the Dodgers and their colleagues made four inspired decisions. One had to do with money, lavishly and well spent. Says Rocco Landesman, a Dodger partner who is also president of the Jujamcyn theater chain, which owns the Martin Beck: "We believe this is the most expensive revival in history. We spent $5 million because we approached the show as if it were new material."

The other three decisions had to do with personnel, who were shrewdly and in some cases daringly chosen. The upshot is a gorgeous production that not only honors the past but also celebrates the present. It showcases the leading director of this era, Jerry Zaks, and the leading designer, Tony Walton, each in peak form. In Faith Prince it makes a new musical star of Ethel Merman-size potential.

The pivotal figure in shaping the new production was director Zaks, 45, who went off to college intending to be a rabbi until he happened upon a student production of Wonderful Town and felt overwhelmed by "the explosion of color and light and sound." His revivals have ranged from an acidulous The Front Page to a pixilated Anything Goes; his new works have varied from the farcical Lend Me a Tenor to the philosophical Six Degrees of Separation. What all Zaks shows have in common is hurtling energy, utter clarity and stylishness that somehow never intrude on the honesty of the characters.

The first choice Zaks made for Guys and Dolls was to eliminate any hint of urban terror, indeed of realism. "I wanted the feeling of something ecstatic, like religion -- not listening to a sermon, but when you're singing and emoting and entering into a happy waking dream. The world these characters inhabit has been declawed." That led to a deliberately overstated, cartoonish style. For crap-game organizer Nathan Detroit, who was gruff and menacing as played by Bob Hoskins in London, Zaks cast Nathan Lane, a patently harmless hyperkinetic who comes on as a blend of Jackie Gleason and Bugs Bunny.

The other basic decision was to ignore four decades of technological development and present Guys and Dolls in the physical style for which it was written. Most modern musicals flow cinematically from scene to scene. Backdrops are rare. Scenes are often sculpted by bursts of white light on actors amid a black, empty space. Back in 1950, shows were written for scenes alternating between full stage depth and a shallow space in front of a curtain while sets were being moved behind. Zaks thinks the appeal of the storytelling is eternal and views his choice to stage the show as a period piece as merely aesthetic. But producer Landesman says, "If you wrote Guys and Dolls now, people would find it silly. Critics would object to the dramaturgy -- the ending is abrupt, and all the important character changes take place offstage. The work needs to be given a historical as well as a geographical location, and this style of production does that."

Zaks' invaluable partner in achieving the nostalgic yet far from sepia look of the show was Walton, 57, a Briton who first earned a reputation for designing elegant period drawing rooms until he "tired of having a recognizable style not arising from the play itself." Now Walton likes to immerse himself in the world of a play: weeks after Guys and Dolls has opened, his living-room coffee table is still a shambles of books by and about Runyon and his times. He views research as "the treat part of the job, like going to school without the horrors of what school was really like."

The prolific Walton had seven shows on Broadway this season, three holdovers and four new works that opened within weeks of one another. But it was Guys and Dolls that brought his 13th Tony nomination (he has won two Tonys, along with an Oscar and an Emmy). Zaks, who had seen Walton's gallery art, suggested that he "just paint." The result was a succession of highly stylized street scenes, ablaze in sunset colors and pulsating blue-purples, yet aggressively two-dimensional and unreal. They convey the aura of city hubbub but never evoke a real place.

Once Walton set the look for the show, costume designer William Ivey Long one-upped him with costumes in eye-aching stripes and plaids. They were a homage to, but far more extreme than, Alvin Colt's 1950 originals. Recalls Harvey Sabinson, a press agent on the original production who is now executive director of the League of American Theaters and Producers: "The original had clothing that was funny. These are costumes that are funny -- that's the difference in the level of reality between the two versions."

When Zaks began casting, he believed revivals require stars -- "but after I heard 'I don't think so' a couple of times, I changed my mind." Instead he created a star of his own, choosing Prince as Adelaide, the shopworn showgirl who has been Nathan's forlorn fiance for the past 14 years. She has been building a reputation among insiders since her Tony-nominated turns in Jerome Robbins' Broadway. In the off-Broadway original of Falsettos, now the best new Broadway musical, her portrayal of a middle-class mother abandoned by her husband for another man was compassionate, heartbreaking and subtle. She was even a hit with critics as a crooked bisexual secretary in this season's biggest bomb, Nick and Nora.

Now she has a part that displays her to the world. Prince has mastered the musical-comedy art of making everything as exaggerated as Kabuki yet remaining utterly real. Her silences get laughs as big as her lines; her takes are often + no more than a glance or a slight tilt of the head, yet they are as howlingly funny as someone else's pratfall; and every absurd moment is suffused with the pain of an ordinary woman yearning for respectability from a man incapable of giving it. As Prince says, "This is my role. She has my sense of humor. The dialogue tumbles out of my mouth."

While TV is likely to beckon, Prince insists, "The musical is my art form." Shows will surely be written for her. Until then, shows that were written for Merman, Rosalind Russell and the other great ladies should be brought out of mothballs. One longs to see Prince in Mame, in Gypsy, in Annie Get Your Gun. For her, Guys and Dolls is probably just the first milestone on a voyage of Golden Age rediscovery.

Amid the acclaim for Guys and Dolls and the rest of this exceptional season can be heard Broadway's perpetual murmur of nervous discontent. The wealth of new shows, a third more than last season, creates a competitive scrabble that may kill off the weakest. The new entries are also putting pressure on holdover shows, like The Will Rogers Follies and The Secret Garden, that need another season to pay back investors. Off-Broadway too has been hard hit, hemorrhaging audiences to the abundance uptown.

Even the winners are queasy. Landesman's five theaters are bulging with hits, including two Tony nominees for best musical and one each for best play and best revival. Yet he frets, "This season had so much that shows cannibalized each other's audiences. And I don't see what's in store for next season -- I can't begin to guess where we will find four nominees for best musical a year from now." Other industry executives agree. Says Sabinson: "This business is cyclical." But then, just a few months ago, no one was so sure about Guys and Dolls either. The limos tell the same old story: hits are made, and Broadway is reborn.