Broadway Boogie-Woogie.(Guys and Dolls)(Theater review)

With all due respect to Nathan Detroit, the palooka who regularly runs a craps game behind the Biltmore garage in "Guys and Dolls" (in revival at the Nederlander), the oldest established permanent floating craps game in New York is actually the Broadway musical. A big roll of the dice, the musical is a paradigm of pluck 'n' luck, the jackpot in cap and bells. "Guys and Dolls," based on Damon Runyon's stories and subtitled "A Musical Fable of Broadway," mines both the rollicking vulgarity and the gleeful rapacity of the rialto. No wonder the show is so jubilant, so eloquent, so pitch-perfect. Has the big-risk-big-reward notion of entrepreneurial capitalism ever worn a happier face? From the first note of "Fugue for Tinhorns"--when the small-time gambler Nicely-Nicely Johnson picks a nag called Paul Revere--we are thrown into the thrilling hubbub of winning and losing, the hustler's version of the American percentage play.

Before the show premiered, in 1950--it ran eleven hundred and ninety-four performances--songwriters frequently referred to Manhattan as a playground; "Guys and Dolls" made it one. Gaming, guzzling, gossiping, the mugs and molls who prowl its streets are all on the hunt: for riches, for love, and, in the case of the Salvation Army workers, for souls to be saved. They're having a helluva time. The question that must be asked of any musical is: Why do the characters sing? Here the audience is never in doubt. Broadway is too damn exciting; its denizens are too damn restless. ("ALWAYS OPEN 10 SHOWS A DAY," reads the blinking burlesque-house sign that is part of the almost overpowering neon glare of the current production.) The city is the buzz. "Where's the action?" "What's playing at the Roxy?" "What's in the Daily News?" "The Biltmore garage wants a grand." There's poetry to be limned from the empty streets "a couple of deals before dawn," and life lessons to be gleaned from shopping. "At Wanamaker's and Saks and Klein's / A lesson I've been taught: / You can't get alterations on a dress you haven't bought," the stripper Adelaide sings.

At the center of "Guys and Dolls," glowing like a kind of nuclear core, is Frank Loesser's gorgeous music, which is, to my mind, one of the high-water marks of the genre. Loesser was a pint-size perfectionist. (He once stepped on a stool in order to slap an actress who wasn't singing at full tilt.) "Guys and Dolls" is musical comedy, not musical theatre. Loesser's songs may not expand the psychology of the characters, but they're always in character. His music and lyrics have tremendous range; they play the same high-low comic game as Runyon's stories, combining highfalutin classical-music elements with vulgar circumstances. For instance, "Oldest Established," a hymn to Nathan's craps game, ends as a cantata; his hustlers tip the ponies in Bach-like counterpoint. Loesser is one of the few lyricists who are genuinely funny in song; he revels in the sludge of urban locutions, and his lyrics are a feast of witty surprises. (He uses "streptococci" in song, for God's sake!) Words sit on the notes with uncanny ease and make them seem inevitable. "There are well-heeled shooters / Ev'rywhere ev'rywhere," the avid gamblers sing. "And an awful lot of lettuce / For the fella who can get us there." Loesser plays a demotic game with slang and syntax, a brilliant simulacrum of Runyon's comedy of manners. "Alright, already, it's true, so nu?" Nathan sings to Adelaide, claiming to love her despite all evidence to the contrary. "So sue me, sue me, / What can you do me?" Like Runyon's prose, the songs engineer a collision of punctilio and illiteracy. "So take back your mink, / To from whence it came," Adelaide sings during her specialty striptease at the Hot Box Club. "And tell them to Hollanderize it / For some other dame." The "from whence" just kills me.

The director, Des McAnuff, who knows his way around musical theatre, and whose most recent gold mine was "Jersey Boys," delivers a successful slick evening, but not without stumbling out of the gate. "Guys and Dolls" traditionally opens with the trumpet voluntary of the "Racetrack First Call"; here, instead of beginning with a laugh that instantly ...