Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/052592/0525410.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 13KB | 252 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 64

Guys, Dolls and Other Hot Tickets


Broadway surges back with a stunning classic from the musical's
Golden Age and other starry plays

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    Every night but Sunday, when the stage inside is dark,
the street fronting Broadway's Martin Beck Theater is a honking
gridlock of limousines -- a shimmering illusion of Manhattan
privilege come to life on pavements only steps away from the
domain of panhandlers, pickpockets and prostitutes. There is no
more characteristic New York City phenomenon than a Broadway hit
in the early days of its run, when popular impact is measured by
the number of people who are conscious that they haven't seen
it yet. In all Broadway history, no hit has been more
distinctively New Yorkish than the show gloriously revived at
the Beck, Guys and Dolls, a self-proclaimed "fable" that
romanticizes hoods and hustlers, touts and troublemakers, into
cuddlesome comic delights. It turns mean streets, back alleys,
even subway tunnels into twinkly urban oases of robust energy
and delight.

    Fittingly, in a season when the Great White Way once again
has an inner glow, this most Broadwayesque of musicals leads
the way. It has been a season of powerhouse new plays by August
Wilson, Herb Gardner, Neil Simon, Brian Friel and Richard
Nelson. It has been a season of movie- and TV-star glitter --
Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin and Amy Madigan in A Streetcar Named
Desire; Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss in Ariel
Dorfman's politically inflamed Death and the Maiden; fast-rising
Larry Fishburne, direct from the angry film Boyz N the Hood to
Wilson's wistful Two Trains Running; Judd Hirsch; Alan Alda;
Jane Alexander; Raul Julia; Gregory Hines. It has been a season
of bountiful musicals -- Crazy for You for Gershwin nostalgia,
Jelly's Last Jam for show-business angst and racial relevance,
Falsettos for AIDS poignancy and artistic perfection, Man of La
Mancha and The Most Happy Fella for old times' sake.

    But if this is the year when long-battered Broadway takes
heart again, the show that symbolizes and crystallizes its
comeback is Frank Loesser's funny valentine to Gotham. In 1950,
when the musical form was still in its heyday, Guys and Dolls
set the town on its ear. Critic John McClain of the New York
Journal-American said the show might be just as good as
Oklahoma! or South Pacific, but more important, he added, "This
is the medium of our town -- not the tall corn or the waving
palms." In 1992 its second coming was even more ballyhooed, from
the front page of the New York Times to the cover of New York
magazine and even network TV. For the first time in years, the
most coveted ticket is not to one of the big British musicals
that disgruntled Yanks term "the chandelier show," "the
helicopter show," "the barricades show" and "the felines show"
(Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Les Miserables, Cats). Local
sages have credited Guys and Dolls with a role in everything
from reviving musical comedy and Broadway as a whole to renewing
public faith in the city and its mayor. In these extravagant
formulations, Guys and Dolls is more than a hit -- it's a myth.

    What is actually onstage is a glorious eruption of color
and comedy and confidence. Like the phalanx of limousines
outside, it celebrates New York as the city longs to see itself
-- stylish, street-smart, sophisticated, successful and, in
comparison with Los Angeles, blessedly serene. For celebrities,
Guys and Dolls has become a must-see. Last week Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman were there; the week before, it was Garry Trudeau
and Jane Pauley. NBC correspondent and best-selling author Betty
Rollin had to settle for standing room while reporting a story.
Yet what gives the show an advance sale of $5 million,
astonishing for a revival without marquee-value stars, is its
appeal to ordinary New Yorkers, like the dozens from a Long
Island temple who gathered last week for a cast reunion of their
staging a decade ago -- and remembered the script well enough
to mouth most of the words.

    No American musical ever had a better book or funnier and
more truthful lyrics, and few had so many catchy, jubilant
tunes in one score. Only a handful have mined a literary vein
as rich as Damon Runyon's wry stories that transmuted thugs into
thinkers and louts into Lochinvars, and elevated their gutter
parlance into a courtly elocution, full of flowery phrases
scrupulously shorn of contractions. While time has been unkind
to many landmark musicals, Guys and Dolls has sustained its
glowing reputation despite a clumsy 1955 Hollywood rendition
with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra and a trendy, swingy
all-black revival on Broadway in 1977.

    After Britain's National Theater triumphed in the early
'80s with a more faithful version emphasizing neon glow and
urban grit, interest surged in another Broadway revival, this
time by the book. A discreet bidding war ensued for the
approval of Loesser's widow, actress Jo Sullivan, who holds key
copyrights and has firm opinions about every detail of staging,
from the flutter of a hand to the color of a necktie. The
winner: a partnership, calling itself the Dodgers, that had
produced noteworthy new musicals (Big River, The Secret Garden)
but never a revival.

    Fortunately for everyone, the Dodgers and their colleagues
made four inspired decisions. One had to do with money,
lavishly and well spent. Says Rocco Landesman, a Dodger partner
who is also president of the Jujamcyn theater chain, which owns
the Martin Beck: "We believe this is the most expensive revival
in history. We spent $5 million because we approached the show
as if it were new material."

    The other three decisions had to do with personnel, who
were shrewdly and in some cases daringly chosen. The upshot is
a gorgeous production that not only honors the past but also
celebrates the pres ent. It showcases the leading director of
this era, Jerry Zaks, and the leading designer, Tony Walton,
each in peak form. In Faith Prince it makes a new musical star
of Ethel Merman-size potential.

    The pivotal figure in shaping the new production was
director Zaks, 45, who went off to college intending to be a
rabbi until he happened upon a student production of Wonderful
Town and felt overwhelmed by "the explosion of color and light
and sound." His revivals have ranged from an acidulous The Front
Page to a pixilated Anything Goes; his new works have varied
from the farcical Lend Me a Tenor to the philosophical Six
Degrees of Separation. What all Zaks shows have in common is
hurtling energy, utter clarity and stylishness that somehow
never intrude on the honesty of the characters.

    The first choice Zaks made for Guys and Dolls was to
eliminate any hint of urban terror, indeed of realism. "I wanted
the feeling of something ecstatic, like religion -- not
listening to a sermon, but when you're singing and emoting and
entering into a happy waking dream. The world these characters
inhabit has been declawed." That led to a deliberately
overstated, cartoonish style. For crap-game organizer Nathan
Detroit, who was gruff and menacing as played by Bob Hoskins in
London, Zaks cast Nathan Lane, a patently harmless hyperkinetic
who comes on as a blend of Jackie Gleason and Bugs Bunny.

    The other basic decision was to ignore four decades of
technological development and present Guys and Dolls in the
physical style for which it was written. Most modern musicals
flow cinematically from scene to scene. Backdrops are rare.
Scenes are often sculpted by bursts of white light on actors
amid a black, empty space. Back in 1950, shows were written for
scenes alternating between full stage depth and a shallow space
in front of a curtain while sets were being moved behind. Zaks
thinks the appeal of the storytelling is eternal and views his
choice to stage the show as a period piece as merely aesthetic.
But producer Landesman says, "If you wrote Guys and Dolls now,
people would find it silly. Critics would object to the
dramaturgy -- the ending is abrupt, and all the important
character changes take place offstage. The work needs to be
given a historical as well as a geographical location, and this
style of production does that."

    Zaks' invaluable partner in achieving the nostalgic yet
far from sepia look of the show was Walton, 57, a Briton who
first earned a reputation for designing elegant period drawing
rooms until he "tired of having a recognizable style not arising
from the play itself." Now Walton likes to immerse himself in
the world of a play: weeks after Guys and Dolls has opened, his
living-room coffee table is still a shambles of books by and
about Runyon and his times. He views research as "the treat part
of the job, like going to school without the horrors of what
school was really like."

    The prolific Walton had seven shows on Broadway this
season, three holdovers and four new works that opened within
weeks of one another. But it was Guys and Dolls that brought his
13th Tony nomination (he has won two Tonys, along with an Oscar
and an Emmy). Zaks, who had seen Walton's gallery art,
suggested that he "just paint." The result was a succession of
highly stylized street scenes, ablaze in sunset colors and
pulsating blue-purples, yet aggressively two-dimensional and
unreal. They convey the aura of city hubbub but never evoke a
real place.

    Once Walton set the look for the show, costume designer
William Ivey Long one-upped him with costumes in eye-aching
stripes and plaids. They were a homage to, but far more extreme
than, Alvin Colt's 1950 originals. Recalls Harvey Sabinson, a
press agent on the original production who is now executive
director of the League of American Theaters and Producers: "The
original had clothing that was funny. These are costumes that
are funny -- that's the difference in the level of reality
between the two versions."

    When Zaks began casting, he believed revivals require
stars -- "but after I heard `I don't think so' a couple of
times, I changed my mind." Instead he created a star of his own,
choosing Prince as Adelaide, the shopworn showgirl who has been
Nathan's forlorn fiance for the past 14 years. She has been
building a reputation among insiders since her Tony-nominated
turns in Jerome Robbins' Broadway. In the off-Broadway original
of Falsettos, now the best new Broadway musical, her portrayal
of a middle-class mother abandoned by her husband for another
man was compassionate, heartbreaking and subtle. She was even
a hit with critics as a crooked bisexual secretary in this
season's biggest bomb, Nick and Nora.

    Now she has a part that displays her to the world. Prince
has mastered the musical-comedy art of making everything as
exaggerated as Kabuki yet remaining utterly real. Her silences
get laughs as big as her lines; her takes are often no more than
a glance or a slight tilt of the head, yet they are as howlingly
funny as someone else's pratfall; and every absurd moment is
suffused with the pain of an ordinary woman yearning for
respectability from a man incapable of giving it. As Prince
says, "This is my role. She has my sense of humor. The dialogue
tumbles out of my mouth."

    While TV is likely to beckon, Prince insists, "The musical
is my art form." Shows will surely be written for her. Until
then, shows that were written for Merman, Rosalind Russell and
the other great ladies should be brought out of mothballs. One
longs to see Prince in Mame, in Gypsy, in Annie Get Your Gun.
For her, Guys and Dolls is probably just the first milestone on a
voyage of Golden Age rediscovery.

    Amid the acclaim for Guys and Dolls and the rest of this
exceptional season can be heard Broadway's perpetual murmur of
nervous discontent. The wealth of new shows, a third more than
last season, creates a competitive scrabble that may kill off
the weakest. The new entries are also putting pressure on
holdover shows, like The Will Rogers Follies and The Secret
Garden, that need another season to pay back investors.
Off-Broadway too has been hard hit, hemorrhaging audiences to
the abundance uptown.

    Even the winners are queasy. Landesman's five theaters are
bulging with hits, including two Tony nominees for best musical
and one each for best play and best revival. Yet he frets,
"This season had so much that shows cannibalized each other's
audiences. And I don't see what's in store for next season --
I can't begin to guess where we will find four nominees for best
musical a year from now." Other industry executives agree. Says
Sabinson: "This business is cyclical." But then, just a few
months ago, no one was so sure about Guys and Dolls either. The
limos tell the same old story: hits are made, and Broadway is
reborn.