Guys and Dolls

This show has now closed, click here for a listing of current and future London shows

Guys and Dolls is currently touring the UK up to June 2007, click here for more information.

Musical closed 14 April 2007

Piccadilly Theatre Denman Street, London

A musical fable of Broadway

Major revival - directed by Michael Grandage and co-produced by The Donmar Waerhouse - of Frank Loesser's classic musical comedy Guys and Dolls based on Damon Runyon's tales of New York City which centre around four characters:

Sarah Brown, the upright but uptight 'mission doll,' out to reform the evildoers of New York's Time Square; Sky Masterson, the slick, high-rolling gambler who woos her on a bet... and ends up falling in love; Adelaide, the chronically ill nightclub performer whose condition is brought on by the fact she's been engaged to the same man for 14 years; Nathan Detroit, her devoted fiance, desperate as always to find a spot for his infamous floating crap game.

When you see a guy, reach for stars in the sky, You can bet that he's doing it for some doll. When you spot a John waiting out in the rain, Chances are he's insane, as only a John can be for a Jane. Call it sad, call it funny, But it's better than even money, That the guy's only doing it for some doll! (Guys and Dolls, lyrics by Frank Loesser)

"Michael Grandage's production lights up the West End with some timeless Broadway magic" The Sunday Times

"You might be able to rock the boat but you can't sink this baby. Frank Loesser's great musical from 1950 is hilarious and lovable in its depiction of Broadway low-lifers - the scurrying gamblers, the eternally affianced showgirl with a psychosomatic cold, and the Sally Army sergeant letting her hair down. Almost every number is a corker, from the harmonious floating romance of 'I'll Know' to the screwball medical patter of 'Adelaide's Lament'. Swerling and Burrows' co-scripted dialogue is ebulliently witty too. So, it is surely a safe bet that Michael Grandage's new West End production will be a hit... There is plenty to celebrate here. To begin with, the Manhattan skyline is dazzling, with a stack of skyscrapers glowing in the dark, a golden bulb in each window like theatre-billboard lights. Also, Rob Ashford's choreography responds brilliantly to dramatic and stylistic shifts in the music... As for the songs, what comes across strongly is Loesser's brilliant ear for catching street sounds and speech rhythms and translating them into music." The Independent on Sunday

"Guys and Dolls is the one - the greatest of all the great Broadway musicals" The Daily Telegraph

"Michael Grandage brings his particular gifts to the show: fleetness, intensity, pinpoint characterisation. He makes every bit of the story matter... Rob Ashford's choreography animates everything, from a sewer upwards. In Havana... the whole joint becomes a whirl of interconnecting limbs. But then the whole show is a whirl of interconnecting pleasures." The Observer

"Wonderful - the happiest of musicals is a constant delight" The Sunday Express

"Jo Swerling and Abe Burrowss adaptation of Damon Runyon's Broadway fables about a charmed criminal underworld couldn't be wittier, and Frank Loesser's music and lyrics are a sequence of surefire hits which never fail to bowl you over. But Grandage's production is a bit lacklustre, dowdy even, in Christopher Oram's design... I can see what Grandage is up to. He's out to strip this wild, escapist fantasy of its romance and reveal it as something more realistic. Which surely misses the point of a fairytale love story between a no-good gangster and a goody-goody God-squadder. While he succeeds in reminding us that the book is so good it would work as a play even without the fabulous score, he overdoes the temperance... Twice, Rob Ashford's sizzling choreography brings the house down." The Mail on Sunday

"One of the most excitingly danced musicals the West End has ever seen" The International Herald Tribune

Damon Runyon's writing - columns, poems, anecdotes, and stories for mass consumption - fed the public's voyeuristic interest in both celebrity and criminal culture. His style vividly rendered the speech of diverse ethnic and socioeconomic groups, giving voice to the feelings of those who may not have had a university education and who were not privy to highbrow culture. He wrote over seventy short stories between 1929 and his death in 1946 for popular magazines like Collier's, Cosmopolitan, and occasionally the Saturday Evening Post. While the venues of these stories often included various racetracks in Florida, Maryland, and upstate New York and descriptions of their gambling machinations, the point of view is always that of a New York City narrator, and it is thus appropriate to term all of Runyon's stories 'Broadway' stories. Hilarious, high-spirited, sophisticated, and insightful, they showed how differently the underclasses lived from the wealthy and how life was hardscrabble for many New Yorkers. Broadway was the quintessence of the melting pot, and Runyon revelled in its variety; the road to prosperity for lower East Side Jews and other immigrants often went straight through Times Square. Runyon was not merely an observer of urban life; he was also a player who interacted with the Broadway figures criminals, gamblers, chorus girls, and journalists - he described. He gave his readers a unique insider's sense of New York in the period between the world wars, with a special focus on the moral ambiguity of the Prohibition era (1920 to 1933) when alcoholic beverages were banned in America. Despite his cynicism, he made his reputation by revealing New York City to outsiders and showing them its seamy side, even as its inhabitants held out the hope that their dreams, like his and that of Sky and Sarah in Guys and Dolls, might be fulfilled.