This past November, I saw two productions of GUYS & DOLLS. To be clear, this is my favorite musical. I have seen over a dozen stage presentations in my long life, and hope to live long enough to see a few more.
The first, in London’s Bridge Theater, is cleverly staged, albeit in what is deceptively referred to as an immersive production, and is somewhat overpraised, by, I suspect, an audience unfamiliar with the show’s provenance. More on that later.
The second, at the San Francisco Playhouse, is distinctive in its amateurishness, which is announced, unintentionally I assume, by a primary stage set, presumably intended to represent Broadway, that more closely resembles a drab, pre-strategically bombed Warsaw.
My issues with the British production are as much about performance than anything else. As was common in musicals of that classical era, GUYS & DOLLS has two romantic arcs, one straight, or, to be more specific, performed by more conventionally attractive actors, the other a comic duo.
In this case, the comic, in particular the role of Nathan Detroit, was played for over-the-top clownish vaudeville, while Adelaide seemed devoid of actual character. This distracted somewhat from the more than acceptable performances of the roles of Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown.
In another regard, the actors, all Brits, delivered their work devoid of anything resembling the Broadway sharpsters, hustlers and hoodlums as written, in convincing but utterly generic American accents that could have played as Peoria. This, of course, leeched the source material of its subtext, which includes an unspoken but all too real Yiddishkeit, here all too conspicuous in its absence.
This undercurrent points to the reality that, in the time and place the source material was written, the clichéd mobster in the mind of the public was as likely to be a onetime Yeshiva bucher as a dropout from St. Anthony’s School for Boys.
And another distraction, which may sound odd coming from me, international pornographer that I am, were the two HOT BOX numbers, both unnecessarily lubricious, conflating burlesque hoochy koo—or at least that modern irony packed eroticism bereft version—with nightclub showgirls and ponies. It felt sleazily inappropriate and it was.
In the case of the San Francisco production, the amateurism noted above was all too pervasive, as much in directorial choices as anything else. Nathan was mostly characterless. The strong voiced and convincing actress cast as Adelaide was a high point, along with the woman portraying Sarah Brown.
Sky Masterson wasn’t bad, per se, but, like the rest of the cast, he seemed to be wearing his own clothes, in a show ostensibly populated with clotheshorses, minks, fancy ties, and checkered coats, getting a mention in the 11 o’clock show stopper, SIT DOWN YOU’RE ROCKING THE BOAT.
In the UK production, I saw the understudy for Nicely Nicely Johnson, who was fine, but in no way resembled the character as written—which seems to be a common thread. In the San Francisco iteration, Nicely Nicely was played by a woman, as were a number of the gamblers, referred to in the script as spoken as “…Boys.”
This sort of thing is no longer a surprise, as silly as it seems to me, and as silly the successful pandering to a misbegotten idea of diversity as it may be.
And speaking of spoken, the character of Big Jule was portrayed in San Francisco by a woman, too, and not a big one, to be sure—and, although the script spells it “Jule,” it is always pronounced “Julie.” Not here, though, jarringly, to me.
And she, like the fellow playing the part in London, threw away her lines, which, for the unfamiliar, are punchlines for others’ setups, without any apparent anticipation of laughs to follow. Neither actor seemed to realize there were jokes there. At least the Brit was big, his name pronounced correctly.
This raises a larger question, in regard to both productions. Curiously, for a musical of such legendary reputation, a canonical classic of the American musical theater, both productions smacked of performances, and choices, not to mention general direction, which seemed to indicate no familiarity with the source material previous to the work being done on those stages, in those moments.
Admittedly, the film version is unforgivably lousy, thanks to the meddling of Sam Goldwyn, whose only forgiveness, to my mind, is for THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES. And since Steven Spielberg’s brilliant remake of WEST SIDE STORY found no audience, it seems unlikely that anyone will be doing right by the material on film any time soon.
And yet. And yet…
…The text, somehow survives.
And, to be clear, by text, I mean the songs, lyrically and musically, the work of the single greatest of those men and women who made up the American Popular Songbook, Frank Loesser. If you don’t believe me, see Stephen Sondheim’s FINISHING THE HAT, volume one of his annotated lyrics, where he validates my long-held opinion in this regard.
From the first post overture number, where Loesser has the audacity, the brilliance, and the brio to conflate Johann Sebastian Bach with the street corner spiels and shouts of a trio of race track touts, we know we are in the presence of, yes, genius.
The score of GUYS & DOLLS, in the tradition firmly established by Rodgers and Hammerstein with their slew of musicals from OKLAHOMA on, is all character based, supporting the libretto, and illuminating the narrative at every turn. Romantic ballad, comic solos and duets, and an eleven o’clock number that electrifies.
And in that realm of audacity, Loesser delivers not one but two acknowledgments of the list song, first made a thing by Cole Porter under the tutelage of Irving Berlin, in the title number, and in IF I WERE A BELL—and goes Porter one better by delivering these brilliant pieces in an American, no, New York City urban vernacular that that urbane son of Peru Indiana could never have imagined.
As I type it’s early December, and as always, it’s lovely to consider the work of Frank Loesser, whose work has both brought me uncountable joy, and influenced the way I think about my own career. Of course, at this time of the year there remains the usual possibility of the usual invasion of the usual dimwitted shitheads in their ignorance, willful or endowed, in their misunderstanding of Loesser’s wonderful duet.
Worst of all in this regard are the second-rate talents behaving like hyenas in their attempt to gain coup by shitting on Loesser’s leonesque brilliance. Like those equally second-rate ninnies who have been going after Robert Crumb for a decade, these philistines are too ignorant and too self-righteously guilelessly self-regarding to be ashamed of themselves.
Maybe, just maybe, they’ve forgotten their usual bullshit about a Christmas song, which it isn’t, about date rape, which it’s not. We can only hope.
And speaking of forgetting, let’s remember Damon Runyon, whose fiction, and to a certain extent whose journalism, informs the libretto of GUYS & DOLLS, and lives in the songs, too. The show is based on THE IDYLL OF SARAH BROWN, and borrows elements of BLOOD PRESSURE, two of Runyon’s typically tight short stories, all of which average around eight thousand words.
I mean, James Breslin—Jimmy to his readers—Runyon’s biographer, is functionally forgotten, so there’s no shock in the fact that Runyon joins John O’Hara and Sinclair Lewis, the last briefly recalled in our neo fascist era for a novel bearing little resemblance to his greater body of work, in the dustbin of history. This, to be abundantly clear, is our loss.
In somewhat the same way that THE GODFATHER taught the mobsters of its generation to speak, Runyon’s fiction provided a lingua franca for the hoodlums of his time. But whereas Coppola created a language of threat and fear, simultaneously humanizing and making accessible the horrible human beings he depicted, Runyon made his hustlers, murderers, whores, and shitheads lovable…
…And that includes the Brain, his fictional version of Arnold Rothstein, a murderous thug who concealed that homicidal streak under a veneer of modest intellectualism.
Runyon himself was an immigrant of sorts, who came to New York City from Kansas—Manhattan, Kansas, at that. His first job was babysitting the onetime gunfighter and lifelong drunk Bat Masterson, who had been hired by a Manhattan daily as a sporting columnist on the basis of his name and, as the Runyon biography implies, his unearned reputation as a gunslinging wild west hero.
Breslin’s description of Masterson continues to make me laugh to this day. Runyon likely added to his babysitting duties by ghosting the sporting column, and, over time, he joined the likes of Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan and the other men and women who covered the entertainment business, mostly in New York, and mostly on Broadway, of course.
In those early to mid-twentieth century days, everybody read at least one, often two or three newspapers a day, and everybody read the columns, for the undisguised dirt, for the blind items, and for the vicarious thrill of those frequently vicious newspapermen and women who wallowed in the sinful night life so you wouldn’t have to. As if you ever could.
It was Runyon who dubbed the theater district “The Roaring Forties,” which Mark Hellinger transmuted into “The Roaring Twenties” for the prohibition time frame of his Warner Brothers’ gangster epic, and that stuck, changing its meaning forever.
And while his colleagues, contemporaries and competition haunted what was then called Café Society—The Stork Club, Mocambo, El Morocco—Runyon spent his evenings in the delicatessens that were all over his beat. It was Lindy’s that he fictionalized as Mindy’s, and, for goyim from Kansas, this guy knew his way around a pastrami on rye.
His fiction, short stories all, as noted above, grew out of his work as a habitue of that lowlife on Broadway, with a career that ran from Prohibition to the Second World War, ended by his death in 1946. He smoked himself to death by lung cancer, as did Frank Loesser, a quarter century later. His ashes were scattered over Broadway from a private plane. Really.
His fiction, first published for the most part in COLLIER’S magazine, was originally illustrated by Floyd Davis. When Harry Beckhoff took over the job of delineating Runyon’s world, the perfect match was made. It can’t be an accident that photographs of the original Broadway production of GUYS & DOLLS bear a striking resemblance to Beckhoff’s brilliant and sly illustrations.
There was a radio show, and a brief television series in the mid-1950s, as well as a number of mostly forgettable film adaptations. Among those, and not forgettable, at least to my mind, is THE BIG STREET, a picture that was supposed to find out if the world wanted Lucille Ball to be a movie star. It apparently didn’t. I dig this picture, based on a story entitled LITTLE PINKS, which co-starred the weirdly miscast Henry Fonda as that title character.
Among the things that make the movie memorable—Eugene Pallette as Nicely Nicely Johnson is a pip—there is a brief sequence in which Millard Mitchell, a contract and supporting player, mostly as a sidekick, whose biggest role was as the studio head in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, delivers a monologue that is as pure a distillation of Runyon’s line of jive as can be heard anywhere. Apropos of nothing, Mitchell’s career was cut short by lung cancer, too. Is there a pattern here?
I even have a dog in this fight. TIME2, a comic book of mine that I love unequivocally despite audience wide universal indifference, was inspired by the cockeyed idea of conflating Runyon’s fables with the fantasy elements of Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories. As Nathan Detroit says, “So sue me…”
For his part, unlike all the other New Yorkers, mostly Jews, who started on Broadway then went Hollywood, Frank Loesser spent nearly two decades in California, mostly at Paramount, churning out standards on his own and in collaboration with the best—most typified by Hoagy Carmichael and Burton Lane, among others.
That standard, noted above, which is neither a Christmas song nor a celebration of your grandparent’s date rape, was first performed by Loesser and his first wife at parties, where “Sing for your supper” wasn’t just a Lorenz Hart lyric.
Unlike his far more commercial successful contemporary Johnny Mercer, whose one and only Broadway success was a pretty damned swell adaptation of Al Capp’s then wildly popular comic strip, LI’L ABNER, Loesser made the transition from songwriter to the Broadway stage five times, winning the Pulitzer Prize for the last of those shows, HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. GUYS & DOLLS won the award, too, which was rescinded due to HUAC’s investigation of Abe Burrows, who wrote the libretto, and sang like a bird for the committee, to no particular avail.
So, as cultural amnesia erases the past, all that remains of Damon Runyon is the musical adaptation, which, it would seem, is beginning to be forgotten as the art object of another time that it most definitely is. I have no specific objection to evolution in musical theater. I loved Daniel Fish’s off the wall take on OKLAHOMA, but knew full well that, outside of the intimacy of a venue the size of THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE, its merit would be lost.
GUYS & DOLLS deserves to be presented with a love of the material and an acknowledgment of its transcendence. It speaks of a time that was and place that likely wasn’t, and does so with a bountiful joy that, even in a misbegotten production, inspires me to work harder at my own craft.
By the same token, Damon Runyon’s work, representing as it does a regional narrative, lost to time, deserves the same reverence accorded to, say, P. G. Wodehouse, another sly regional with a distinctive narrative voice.
And with that, I invite all of you to join me in reading, in my case rereading, the body of work this unfortunately forgotten genius left behind.
Trust me on this.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin—a Prince.