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Artist: Words/music by Frank Loesser

Reporter: Scott Simon

Producer: Hannah Lord

Editor: Gwen Thompkins

Length: 17:45

Fred Ebb, lyricist (DAT available)

Cy Feuer, Producer (DAT available)

Jerry Zaks, director (DAT available)

Revival Broadway Cast Recording

Frank Loesser sings

When Frank Loesser's musical "Guys and Dolls" opened at the 46th Street Theatre 50 years ago this weekend, it was Broadway's first and best musical about Broadway--not the neon thicket of bright lights and blooming marquees, but Broadway's more garish undergrowth, Damon Runyon's world of gamblers, touts and showgirls itching and straining to roll sevens and 11s in the great crapshoot they call life.

The musical was not as innovative as "Oklahoma!," which opened in 1943, or as socially conscious as 1949's "South Pacific," but "Guys and Dolls" was a brassy, daring and unrelenting entertainment, a show that could be rough, sultry, subtle and vulgar; would-be saints and aspiring sinners all singing common notes. The world had just ended one war in 1950 and often seemed on the verge of another. Hadn't we learned that `being good' sometimes isn't as good as just being lucky?

Fred Ebb, who would one day help compose sharp, pointed, mold-breaking musicals, including "Cabaret" and "Chicago," saw "Guys and Dolls" when he was 11 years old.

"It was the first musical I ever saw. I thought it was naturally the best musical I ever saw. And nothing I've seen in the interim did anything to diminish my opinion."

"Guys and Dolls" was taken from the works of Damon Runyon and the New York he created in short stories and newspaper columns, a Times Square tawdry and alive with hustlers, squares, pigeons, rusty hearts, easy marks and molls with hearts of gold. When Broadway producer Cy Feuer telephoned composer and lyricist Frank Loesser, he opened with a single word, as Mr. Loesser recalled it.

"He said the magic word, `Runyon.' I said, `Let's have a meeting,' and that was it."

Frank Loesser had just turned 30. Although born in New York, he'd become a Hollywood composer and had spent World War II writing for Army camp shows, which produced one sterling hit: "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." Cy Feuer and his partner, Ernie Martin, reasoned that a man who'd managed to fit God and gunpowder into the same lyrical breath could make a musical out of the idiosyncrasies of Damon Runyon's loveable lowlifes: Harry the Horse, Nicely Nicely, Nathan Detroit and Big Jule from Chicago. Cy Feuer, who's now 89, told us that he and his partner had told Frank Loesser it might take a year to craft a script from which Mr. Loesser could then compose songs."

"And he said, `OK,' but then he couldn't resist it and he started writing. We heard the material, and it just made us more enthusiastic than ever, except we had no story. And when we finally got a story, it had nothing to do with horse racing. It had to do with crapshooting. And to this day, no one has ever said to us, `Why do you open the show about horse players and then never see them again, and switch over to crapshooters?' It was an unreal real show. That's what made it different. So unreal show based upon tough reality."

They abstracted a story line from an old Runyon fable called, "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown." A slick-suited hustler named Sky Masterson takes a bet to make the first woman he sees fall in love with him. The first woman he sees is Miss Sarah, a prim but unexpectedly sultry Salvation Army drum thumper.

Isabel Bigley, an American actress working in London, was cast as Sarah. She is the last surviving member of the original Broadway cast.

"There had been musicals before, but they were always pretty girls and pretty boys, and you knew when a song was comingup. And I think with 'Guys and Dolls,' this had gags in it, it had bad guys and good guys, and everything just blended. I mean, you went into a song and it was part of the script. It wasn't `We'll stop and now we'll sing a song.'"

The producers particularly wanted to work in Runyon's character of Nathan Detroit, a gambler who was essentially a producer of roving crap games. The thousand dollars Nathan has to raise to stage a dice game for Big Jule from Chicago reminded the producers of the sums they had to raise to put on shows. Cy Feuer and his partners had wanted an old Yiddish theater vaudevillian named Sam Levene for the role. He'd played Runyonesque characters before with the requisite New York rasp, swagger and stage smarts. Nathan Detroit may have been the role that Sam Levene had been born to play-except he was tone deaf.

Sam Levene had this recollection for a benefit program in 1959.

"I went to Mr. Loesser's house and he sat down at the piano, and he says, `Well, let me hear you sing. What do you know?' And I said, `"Pony Boy."' He said, `I don't believe it. Is that the only song you know?' I said, `Yeah.' He says, `Do you know "The Star-Spangled Banner"?' I said, `Not enough of it.' So he said, `Well, let's sing "Pony Boy."' So I sang "Pony Boy" and he got through and he said, `Well, this, of course, is impossible. Now let's do it the right way.' I says, `This is the right way. I can't do it any other way.'"

"So Frank wrote "Sue Me" for Sam, or for the character, and when we were trying it we hit a piano note when he came to the audition; went, `Da, da, da, da, da, sue me. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum,' we'd hit the piano, `Sue me.' And Sam would say, `Da, da, da, da, da,' and Sam would say, (off key) `Sue me.' `Da, da, da,' (off key) `Sue me.' He couldn't even say `Sue me' in-and finally, Frank wrote, `Call a lawyer and,' so that you could sneak up on it."

"The entire thing was sung out of tune," Mr. Feuer remembers. "He never, ever sang it in tune. And it was absolutely right for the character Nathan."

In the 1992 revival of the show, Nathan Lane, who, by the way, took his stage name from the character of Nathan Detroit, showed that the song can also expand for a real singer.

Nathan Detroit has been engaged for 14 years to Adelaide, a dancer at the Hot Box Club. She devoutly believes that her prolonged bachelor status has given her an uncommon cold.

Vivian Blaine, one of Broadway's ranking blonde molls, had wanted to
play the lead, Sarah Brown, but producers didn't know if her mature va-va-voom
would fit into a Salvation Army suit.

"They said they couldn't quite see me as the mission doll," Vivian Blaine remembered in 1959 when Frank Loesser had phoned to say he'd put a new character into the show. "'There's now a woman who is in her 40s by the name of Miss Adelaide.' And I said, `Well, thanks a lot, Sam, that's a big help.' He said, `Well, listen to this.'"

Today, Adelaide's lament is often considered a perfect comic song. Lyricist Fred Ebb comments on this.

"Here's a girl who's got a cold all through the play and she says she has a cold 'cause somebody isn't going to marry her. That's a very rich comic notion. And she's got these hilarious punch lines. You know, if she's getting a kind of name for herself and the name ain't his; if she's tired of gettin' the fish eye from the hotel clerk. Every line in it is worth something. It means something; has impact. It has vitality. It has humor and charm and appropriateness. And I don't know how you can get much better than that."

But when "Guys and Dolls" opened its tryout run in Philadelphia in the fall of 1950, every performance led to fresh changes. Robert Alda, who played Sky Masterson, recalled.

"Forty of the 41 shows were completely different. In other words, we continuously were making changes. You'd think we had the world's worst flop on our hands."

There was at least one ugly moment. The producers had wanted a Sarah Brown whose voice could be lyrical and larklike amid the snarl of mid-Manhattan, but Frank Loesser thought Isabel Bigley's pure bell of a voice struck the wrong note. Fifty years later, Isabel Bigley remembers a wounding afternoon.

"We were doing a song and Frank didn't want me to sing it. And it had a very different range, and I said, `Well, why did you hire a singer if you don't want me to sing it?' And he said, `I want you to speak it.' And he started hollering, and I got very nervous and I giggled. And he hauled off and slapped me. And I think he was as stunned as I was. And I just continued on with the song like it had never happened. From that moment on, everyone was my pal because they thought it was so terrible. And his wife at the time, Lynne, did send me a dozen red roses. But Frank never apologized. You know, we all understood. There was tension; we were going to open in a couple of days and everybody was under tremendous pressure. We were working almost 24 hours a day."

Frank Loesser eventually gave Isabel Bigley something more enduring than roses, the show's first hit song. When Sarah Brown takes her first curious swig of liquor, she finds a new voice for her feelings for Sky Masterson.

"One night about 1:00 in the morning, Frank called me and said, `Get dressed, get down to my suite.' And I met with him and Cy Feuer. And he said, `We're going to try the song. Do it in front of the curtain, and you have to pretend you're drunk.' And we worked on it till about 5:00 in the morning. And they said, `OK, we're going to put it in on the matinee.' And I looked at them like they were crazy. And they said, `Well, we'll know if it's going to work. And if it works, then we'll work on it.' And, `Go home, get a couple hours of rest, and we'll see you at the theater.' We put it in the matinee, got a standing ovation and we never changed a thing."

'Guys and Dolls' would win all the major Tony awards in 1951. Remarkably, the show would again win for best musical when Jerry Zacks revived it in 1992. But only Vivian Blaine as Adelaide was asked to star in the 1955 movie version of the show. Marlon Brando was cast as Sky Masterson. He sang a demanding vocal role in a kind of tuneless whisper.

While Frank Sinatra, who had one of the great pop voices of all time, played the Nathan Detroit role that Sam Levene had made voice-proof. Isabel Bigley would retire from show business happily within just a few years. Robert Alda and Sam Levene continued as busy as productive actors, but never again had roles to match those of Sky and Nathan. Cy Feuer, incredibly, continues to produce Broadway shows at the age of 89. Frank Loesser went on to write another musical landmark, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," but he was just 50 when he died from a heart attack in 1969.

Today, it is irresistible to see at least a few glints of "Guys and Dolls" in the stagecraft of "West Side Story," the setting and theme of "Sweet Charity" and in the syntax of the musical "Chicago." Director Jerry Zacks comments on this.

"There's now question that we'll be seeing productions of "Guys and Dolls" in 50 years, and hopefully beyond that, because it is a timeless--you know, even though it's about gamblers and their dolls and their dames and the inhabitants of Times Square, the fact is, for me, the love stories in that show and the brilliance of the music--I use the word `joy' a lot, but that's what I think the show is all about, a kind of infectious joy that makes you just want to join them up there on stage. I don't think that's ever going to grow old-fashioned or out of date."

Over the years, one song has probably become "Guys and Dolls'" signature. Sky Masterson discovers that the woman whose affections he wanted to win on a bet has won his love with her sheer goodness. He makes one last roll of his dice to deliver his fellow gamblers to Sister Sarah's mission and to save his own soul. Robert Alda was the first man to sing.

Choreographer Michael Kidd staged a ballet beneath the streets and sewer pipes, all lunging pinstripes; strutting, flared slacks and fluttering bankrolls. The song captures the keen sensation that gamblers and young lovers, guys and dolls, all share: the nerve to shake up their lives and bet all on a feeling.

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Artist: Words/music by Frank Loesser Reporter: Scott Simon Producer: Hannah Lord Editor: Gwen Thompkins Length: 17:45 Fred Ebb, lyricist (DAT available) Cy Feuer, Producer (DAT available) Jerry Zaks, director (DAT available) Revival Broadway Cast Recording Frank Loesser sings When Frank Loesser's musical "Guys and Dolls" opened at the 46th Street

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This article is about the process of making the musical Guys and Dolls.

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The Information that I would get from this article is how the musical became Guys and Dolls. 

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The Information that I would get from this article is how the musical became Guys and Dolls. 

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"We heard the material, and it just made us more enthusiastic than ever, except we had no story."

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"We heard the material, and it just made us more enthusiastic than ever, except we had no story."

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"The entire thing was sung out of tune," Mr. Feuer remembers. "He never, ever sang it in tune. And it was absolutely right for the character Nathan."

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Stageagent article about Guys and Dolls musical. 

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Stageagent article about Guys and Dolls musical. 

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Synopsis

Guys and Dolls is a musical romantic comedy involving the unlikeliest of Manhattan pairings: a high-rolling gambler and a puritanical missionary, a showgirl dreaming of the straight-and-narrow and a crap game manager who is anything but. Set in the Manhattan of Damon Runyon's short stories, Guys and Dolls tells of con-man Nathan Detroit's efforts to find new life for his illegal, but notorious, crap game. When their trusty venue is found out by the police, Nathan has to find a new home for his crap game quickly - but he doesn't have the dough to secure the one location he finds. Enter Sky Masterson, a high-rolling gambler willing to take on any honest bet with a high enough reward attached. Nathan bets Sky that he can't take the "doll" of Nathan's choosing to Havana, Cuba, with him on a date. When Sky agrees to the bet, Nathan chooses uptight Evangelist Sergeant Sarah Brown, head of Broadway's Save-a-Soul Mission. Sky thinks he's been duped, but he's in for even more of a surprise when his efforts to woo Sarah are so successful that he falls in love with her himself! Guys and Dolls takes us from bustle of Times Square to the dance clubs of Havana to the sewers of New York City as it demonstrates the great lengths to which a guy will go when he truly falls in love with a "doll." Guys and Dolls features some of Frank Loesser's most memorable tunes, including the hilarious "Adelaide's Lament," the romantic "I've Never Been in Love Before," the exuberant "If I Were a Bell," and the classic "Luck Be a Lady."

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Guys and Dolls (Musical) Plot & Characters

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Guys and Dolls is a musical romantic comedy involving the unlikeliest of Manhattan pairings: a high-rolling gambler and a puritanical missionary, a showgirl dreaming of the straight-and-narrow and a crap game manager who is anything but.

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This article is about what Guys and Dolls is about.

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This article is about what Guys and Dolls is about.

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"Guys and Dolls is a musical romantic comedy involving the unlikeliest of Manhattan pairings"

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"Guys and Dolls is a musical romantic comedy involving the unlikeliest of Manhattan pairings"

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"Guys and Dolls tells of con-man Nathan Detroit’s efforts to find new life for his illegal, but notorious, 🤬 game."

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The Information that I would get from this Article is what the Musical Guys and Dolls is.

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The Information that I would get from this Article is what the Musical Guys and Dolls is.

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Playmakers article about Guys and Dolls.

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Playmakers article about Guys and Dolls.

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by Gregory Kable
Part One: Broadway, or Luck Be a Lady
"All life is six-to-five against."

As one of Damon Runyon's signature aphorisms reinforces, it was never a sure thing. When producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin landed on Runyon's fiction as the basis for a follow-up to their sole Broadway musical to date, 1939's Where's Charley?, based on the Victorian cross-dressing farce Charley's Aunt, they immediately turned to the composer of that previous hit, Frank Loesser, who readily took to the gamble.

Doubtless, Runyon's peculiar appeal, Prohibition-era tales steeped in such specificity, irony, and a droll objectivity accounting for their humor on the page, made them even more unusual a source for musical treatment than the Brandon Thomas chestnut. But adding to the uncertainty of the venture, Broadway exited the 1940s less invested in romance and fancy than a sober, searching realism. The towering dramas of post-WW2 America, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, blazed the path for such 50s classics as Come Back, Little Sheba, Tea and Sympathy and The Crucible. Reinforced by the sobriety of films like Gentleman's Agreement, On the Waterfront, and the landmark movie adaptation of Streetcar. American art ushered in an era of grit and frankness whose collective glare confirmed the truth of Williams' surrogate self in The Glass Menagerie, whose protagonist rhapsodizes, "nowadays the world is lit by lightning!"

Neon Wonderland: New York's Times Square in the Age of Runyon.

(www.mindsimedia.info)

Despite its position as a national institution in postwar popular culture, even the musical was not immune. Long considered a delightful diversion, the genre's historical highlights were as significant for their relative rarity as for their trumping of standing conventions. Suddenly the musical had upped its game, as the 40s trended toward greater integration among the elements of a show (its story, songs, and staging) which retreated from traditions of freewheeling creativity toward a more contained verisimilitude. By the late 40s an unapologetic fantasy like Finian's Rainbow, intersecting love stories, political satire and leprechauns, would stand as the exception that proves the rule-under the influence of the teaming of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the musical was increasingly honoring logic and probability. 1943's Oklahoma!, followed by Carousel and South Pacific were heralded as the genre's welcome and long-delayed maturation.

But not everyone was buying. The musical still suffered a lack of full critical acceptance. In his groundbreaking 1946 study The Playwright as Thinker, the formidable scholar Eric Bentley dismissed the genre wholesale as crude folk art succeeding on stage through the thinnest distractions of song, dance, and spectacle, in Bentley's words, "embellishments on a scarecrow", which summarizes his patronizing stance. But even Bentley would change his tune a decade later, including Guys and Dolls among a quintet of representative American Dramas in an anthology of works due respect and esteem, lionizing the piece both "the best of all musical comedies" and "an organic product of American life." Like the Salvationists forming one half of the landscape of Guys and Dolls, Bentley became a convert.

Still, the accolades were in its future. In development, Guys and Dolls remained a wild card in a more regulated gaming environment, and its producers were doing what they could to even the board. Loesser proved an invaluable asset, writing prospective songs at the breakneck speed of a thoroughbred, while the thorny issue of a useable storyline seemed a bigger obstacle than initially thought. That pull of Rodgers and Hammerstein was strong, and the earliest concept for Guys and Dolls was a straightforward love story between two sharply opposed personalities (the most recent model being that hard-won romance between French planter Emile De Becque and Midwestern nurse Nellie Forbush in the Pulitzer Prize-winning South Pacific).

It took a dozen attempts to solve the problems with the book, before veteran comic Abe Burrows proved the perfect foil to that enervating tone of misguided sincerity. Burrows was an effortless match for the Runyon style, most notably in his beloved radio show Duffy's Tavern which, like Runyon's fiction, was long on locale, idiosyncrasy, and vividly vernacular characters and speech. It was Burrows who skewed the story toward comedy which paradoxically strengthened the romance. As with the complementary relationship between these structural features, Loesser and Burrows seemed as potently synchronous. For all of its sense of cohesion, Burrows was primarily fitting s story around Loesser's completed tunes and lyrics, the antithetical approach to the unifying principle of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show. That the seams aren't visible and the narrative and numbers dovetail so easily in and out of one another is a testament to the daring, artistry and imaginative breadth of both composer and bookwriter. The additions of the legendary George S. Kaufman as director and the robust Michael Kidd as choreographer only further sweetened both the pot and its prospects. Guys and Dolls opened in November 1950 and ran for an impressive 1,200 performances. Lady Luck had clearly descended and been charmed into turning all of those risks to rewards.

Those "six-to-five" odds from Runyon's opening epigraph had been outpaced and the show paid huge dividends. Guys and Dolls became an instant classic, and Loesser the hottest property in town. A resurgence in Runyon's work was one happy consequence (he had died in 1946), and Feuer and Martin's reputations were secured. They would again team with Loesser and Burrows for the perennially popular How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1961. And in a turn of events worthy of a Broadway musical, this final collaboration would itself garner the Pulitzer Prize, capping the careers of its creators and further cementing the status of the genre. As only the fourth musical to win the coveted award to that point, it also again argued for the equality of musical comedy with that more serious minded form of the musical play. Just as in Guys and Dolls, it was payoffs and happy endings all around. Perhaps the impetus lay in that initial challenge of probable defeat calculated in Runyon's "six-to-five" odds. As Runyon himself continued, that imbalance is "just enough to keep you interested." Audiences have been enraptured ever since, and the show's fervent gestation period mirrors that of the essential action of Guys and Dolls: shared leaps into the unknown with utopian hopes of reconciling conflicts, both instances speaking to and embodying "A Musical Fable of Broadway."

Next Up: Beating the Odds, Part Two: America and the World.

See the PlayMakers Summer Youth Conservatory production of Guys and Dolls July 15-25.

Click here or call 919.962.7529 for tickets or more information.

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Beating the Odds: How Guys and Dolls Conquered Broadway, America, and the World | PlayMakers Repertory Company

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by Gregory Kable Part One: Broadway, or Luck Be a Lady "All life is six-to-five against." As one of Damon Runyon's signature aphorisms reinforces, it was never a sure thing. When producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin landed on Runyon's fiction as the basis for a follow-up to their sole Broadway musical to date, 1939's...

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This article is about how popular the musical Guys and Dolls got.

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This article is about how popular the musical Guys and Dolls got.

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The Information that I would get from this article is how Guys and Dolls became a classic. 

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The Information that I would get from this article is how Guys and Dolls became a classic. 

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"Guys and Dolls became an instant classic, and Loesser the hottest property in town."

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"Guys and Dolls became an instant classic, and Loesser the hottest property in town."

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". They would again team with Loesser and Burrows for the perennially popular How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1961. And in a turn of events worthy of a Broadway musical, this final collaboration would itself garner the Pulitzer Prize"