A confessed pleasure of reading obituaries has nothing to do with a fascination of death. Obituaries just happen to be where you'll find some good writing. And that can be said for book, theater and movie reviews.
Consider today's review of Guys and Dolls by Ben Brantley. Aside from the show, Mr. Brantley describes Damon Runyon's writing style that has his characters speak Runyonese, "a mix of courtly formality, tough-guy vernacular and pretzel shaped sentences." Couldn't be better said. Consider the opening paragraph from Runyon's Idyll of Sarah Brown, one of the stories that the show draws from:
Of all the high players this country ever sees, there is no doubt but that the guy they call The Sky is the highest. In fact, the reason he is called The Sky is because he goes so high when it comes to betting on any proposition whatever. He will bet all he has, and nobody can bet any more than this.
We have to thank someone that Runyon never listened to any English teacher who might have tried to straighten his pretzels out. It would have been as bad as if Nat King Cole listened to the doctor who heard him sing and told him he belonged in bed because he had a terrible cold.
Apparently, however, the show doesn't do as well as Runyon, or prior productions. That's a shame. If Ben Brantley is right (and not just mistaken) and they monkeyed with the show enough to make Miss Adelaide a stripper, then it would be no wonder that the show is not so good.
I first saw Guys and Dolls as a revival in the mid 60s at City Center. It starred Hugh O'Brien as Sky Masterson, Jan Murray as Nathan Detroit and Vivian Blaine, reprising her role as Ms. Adelaide. Also reprising were Stubby Kaye as Nicely Nicely Johnson, and B.S. Pully as Big Jule, the man who played with dice that had no spots, and therefore didn't lose. He remembered exactly where they were.
And thinking of dice, the 1992 production featured a pair of tumbling dice in the Guys and Dolls title. Only the dice were depicted wrong. Opposite sides of a die always add up to seven. Those dice didn't. I wasn't the only one who pointed that out to the producers. It seems the women in the box office knew enough from visits to relatives in Atlantic City that the dice were drawn wrong.
The 1992 production was a smash hit. The favorable review appeared on the front page of the paper of record the next day, below the fold, but prominent in size. I always regretted not seeing the production a second time. It was that good. I'm still amazed at the set and lighting for the crap game. You really felt the stage opened up and they went down where Con Ed does its best work.
So, by all accounts they might have gotten the dice right this time, but not much else. Casting a black man as Nicely Nicely Johnson might work for those who don't remember the prior productions, or have any clue about the era, but for me it would be a drawback.
Like many small businesses the family flower shop relied on money from money-lenders, otherwise known as loan sharks. Six-for-five guys. Borrow a $100, pay back $120. Soon. One fellow who came by to collect always reminded me of Nicely Nicely Johnson. The guy even looked like Stubby Kaye, but not quite so Stubby. He was always in a suit and tie, had a snap brimmed hat that he tipped when my uncle reached into the register and pulled out whatever it was that was due. Nobody ever wrote anything down, and I guess eventually we were paid up.
We had to be good payers, because the guy's business got so good he'd send his daughter down to collect. She was going to the University of Wisconsin that I remember, and had a summer job with dad. For some odd reason I was always proud that we were so little trouble to a loan shark that he trusted his daughter to come and see us. She was like family.
So, based on what I've read, the show might not be around too long. I won't be going to see it so I won't get the chance to see the newsstand that appears in some scenes. In the 1992 production I distinctly remember the newsstand had a sign over it: G. Spelvin/Newsstand.
I don't know who came first, but Georgina Spelvin was a porn star in the 1970s.
After all, the show is about Broadway.
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