GUYS and Dolls

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 874, 4 May 1956, Page 7

GUYS and

Dolls

JT all began, guys who knew him in those -days. will tell: you, because Damon Runyon was broke. Not fat broke, for Runyon was at that time one of the most successful sports writers in New York, but temporarily embarrassed by the high cost of a looming appendix operation. Before the doctor got his hands on the Runyon appendix, its owner had shut himself in his room to write a work of fiction which he hoped would bring in the necessary 500 dollars. Both the appendix and the fiction came out well, and a magazine editor offered to buy as many short stories of the same type as the author could supply. That was the start of a Broadway saga as story after story poured from Runyon’s typewriter during the 1930’s-sardonically humorous tales of tarnished saints and haloed sinners, where good and evil were mostly relative. Runyon never wrote a story called Guys and Dolls, but a lot of theatregoers in the United States and Britain know Runyon best through the musical adaptation, by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, of his The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown, with a few characters added from other tales. Guys and Dolls (music and lyrics by Frank Loesser) hit Broadway in 1950. It was promptly rated as the best. musical book since Pal Joey (1940), and ‘far and away the best musical of the year. The music from the show will be heard in YA Theatre of, Music on Sdturday, May 12, with the original Broadway cast led by Robert Alda as Sky Masterson; Isabel] Bigley as Miss Sarah Brown; Vivian Blaine as Miss Adelaide, and Sam Levene as Nathan Detroit. New Zealanders will shortly be able to see a screen version, written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, and starring Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Vivian Blaine and Frank Sinatra, with Stubby Kaye, B. S, Pully and Johnny Silver in their Broadway roles of NicelyNicely Johnson, Big Jule and Benny Southstreet. Frank Loesser’s dexterous and witty lyrics, set to music ranging from the simple to the supercharged, include a couple of songs, "A Bushel and a Peck" and "Luck Be a Lady,’ which have already ‘streamed out of countless radios and juke-boxes here. Some others have not been widely heard, and these include the romantic "If I Were a Bell"; the amusing "Adelaide’s Lament"; "Sue

Me," and "Matry the Man Today." "Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat," is an operatic but uproarious number put over in inimitable style by Stubby Kaye and chorus, * Guys and Dolls is a romantic story, demonstrating that "the softest hearts may be found beneath the latest fashion in bullet-proof vests," to quote J. C. Furnas on Runyon’s work. Sergeant Sarah Brown, of the Save-A-Soul Mission, falls in love with Sky Masterson, a high-rolling gambler. In contrast there is the story of Nathan Detroit, relentlessly pursued to the altar by a

night-club singer, Adelaide, while trying to keep New York’s cidestestablished dice game afloat. by moving it to a new location every night, one jump ahead of the police. Both dolls get their guys in the end, in completely virtuous fashion, the police are hoodwinked, and justice and morality survive some pretty close calls.