Guys and Dolls

Song List

“It’s the perfect musical comedy.”
– Daily News

History

The original production opened on Broadway November 24, 1950 and ran for 1,200 performances. A 1976 revival, featuring Robert Guillaume and an all-black cast, ran for 239 performances, and the hit 1992 revival with Peter Gallagher, Nathan Lane and Faith Prince ran almost as long the original! The film version, starring Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra & Vivian Blaine (recreating her role as Adelaide), had the highest box-office gross of 1955.

Awards

“Guys & Dolls” won 8 Tony Awards (including music & lyrics) and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The 1992 production won a Tony for Best Revival, and its cast album was awarded the Grammy.

Short Synopsis

It all begins with a bet. Nathan Detroit bets high-rolling gambler Sky Masterson that Sky cannot persuade Save-A-Soul Missionary Sister Sarah Brown to accompany him on a trip to Cuba. While the worldly Sky works his charms on a wary Sarah, Nathan is doing his best to stay outside the matrimonial clutches of his long-suffering fiancée, Miss Adelaide. “Guys and Dolls” is a fable about what happens to gambling men and the women who long to tame them. Set in the colorful world of New York City in the mid 20th century, the romantic and funny “Guys And Dolls” is populated with gangsters and gamblers, missionary dolls and scantily clad showgirls, and is one of the great musical scores in the history of American theatre.

Reviews

“Nathan needs one thousand dollars to rent a garage for the crap game. From then on, character is destiny.”
“One of the funniest and melodious shows in seasons. Everything about it seems practically perfect.”

– Variety

“This is why Broadway was born! ”

– Newsweek

“The Beggar’s Opera of Broadway.”

– Kenneth Tynan

“Yes its setting is unique, its patois is unique, and its score is unique. But what’s uniquely unique here is the way the show concentrates on the quartet and its two very separate networks, of life on the street and life in the lord. This is a young show, but a wise one, something that shouldn’t be possible.”

“It’s astonishing how many mundane situations tickled Loesser’s muse…”

“It was the quintessence of Broadway – naive, impulsive, self-centered, and lively. The music in Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella… was imaginative and rich in the finest tradition of character description. Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, in 1950, was a masterly achievement in the new tradition – music, story, characters, acting, and direction pouring out of the same crucible. Musical dramas with nobler themes have been less perfectly composed than this breezy legend of an underworld derived from some of Damon Runyan’s stories. Less original writers than Runyan, Burrows, Swerling and Loesser could have romanticized (the gamblers of Guys and Dolls) into Bohemians. But the genius of Guys and Dolls was to portray them without glamour, and the genius of Loesser was to characterize them musically with candor and relish. There was not a commonplace or superfluous song in the score. “The Oldest Established Crap Game” “A Bushel and a Peck” “Adelaide’s Lament” “If I Were a Bell” “My Time of Day” “Take Back Your Mink” “More I Cannot Wish You” “Sue Me” “You’re Rocking the Boat” and “Marry the Man Today” were both the structure and the pith of the story.. Guys and Dolls was a carnival of shoddy Broadway innocents lost in a furtive but favulous world, and nothng George M. Cohan wrote had the insight, humor, compassion, and variety of Loesser’s Broadway Classic.”

– Brooks Atkinson, BROADWAY (MacMillan, NY 1970)