Guys and Dolls on the Cape
By IRIS FANGER | July 25, 2006
Garrett Long and Jarrod Emick |
If there’s a God in show-biz Heaven, she’s no doubt relieved that the folks at Cape Playhouse in Dennis had enough theatrical smarts to mount Guys and Dolls (through July 29) without messing around. Rather than impose a new concept or update the classic American musical, which opened on Broadway in 1950 and ran for nearly three years, director Mark Martino has imported a high-gloss cast of New York–based veterans to re-create the lovable sinners looking for action along the by-ways of Times Square, in an era when sin meant gambling and alcohol rather than drug dealers and fears of backpack-toting bombers.The Dennis miracle lies in shoehorning 19 performers with an 11-piece orchestra to back them onto the venerable summer theater’s minuscule stage — not to mention devising room for the dance numbers created by John MacInnis. I counted five couples in the “Havana” number and 10 men in the line-up of the “Luck Be a Lady” ballet, which means that the actors in their multiple roles were as precisely choreographed in their costume changes as in their dance numbers.
Then as now, the characters swell with the humor and joie de vivre of Damon Runyon’s characters as enhanced by the book of Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows and Frank Loesser’s glorious score. There’s not a less-than-delightful moment, from the opening ballet in Times Square as the citizens come out to play beneath the lighted marquees of the theaters (the signature staging that was reverentially borrowed for The Producers) to the finale in the Save-a-Soul Mission where the cordially rotund Nicely-Nicely Johnson (Richard Ruiz) leads his fellow lowlife pals through the rousing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.”
Garrett Long as Miss Sarah Brown must have jolted the folks in nearby Yarmouth and Barnstable off their front porches when she let loose on the opening high notes of “I’ll Know (When My Love Comes Along).” She’s the good girl, the Mission “doll,” in contrast to the slightly frazzled but wistfully loyal Liz Larsen as Miss Adelaide, the centerfold leading the ladies of the chorus at the Hot Box Nightclub while waiting for crap-game organizer Nathan Detroit to marry her. This is one of the choice roles in the annals of stellar musicals, and Larson does not disappoint. Despite looking more boyish than dangerous, Jarrod Emick’s Sky Masterson meets matinee-idol expectations, and Jason Graae makes Nathan Detroit into a lovable louse. But it’s Gerry McIntyre’s Benny Southstreet, one of Nathan’s flunkies, who gives the production its pizzazz.
Guys and Dolls remains a tangible treasure of the golden age of Broadway musicals, a reminder of the days when audiences could leave the theater with the newest hit songs stuck in their heads rather than images of the latest stage technologies.
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