Guys & Dolls (Re-issue With Bonus Tracks)

By the 1990s, with ticket prices skyrocketing and the number of new musicals dropping, revivals had gained added importance on Broadway. There seemed to be two basic approaches to them. One was to revamp the vintage show, attempting to bring it up to date in terms of sound, staging, and social attitudes. The other was to faithfully recreate the original. The producers of the second Broadway revival of the 1950 musical Guys and Dolls (following an unsuccessful all-black version in 1976) largely opted for the latter approach, and looking at the material, it's easy to see why. The show, based on Damon Runyan's tales and lowlife urban characters, is not one that would respond well to an encounter with political correctness, and Frank Loesser's songs, full of street argot, were period pieces originally, so giving them new interpretations would be pointless.

The 1992 Guys and Dolls wisely repeated the best of the original. At the same time, there were minor changes. The production was bigger and more exaggerated, the characterizations more cartoonish. Musically, however, very little changed. Michael Starobin added occasional touches to George Bassman and Ted Royal's original orchestrations, but mostly recreated them. And the show benefited from outstanding casting, beginning with Faith Prince in the key role of Adelaide, the longtime fiancée of gambler Nathan Detroit. Prince, part of a long line of comic Broadway actresses that includes Judy Holliday and the original Adelaide, Vivian Blaine, nailed the part and won a Tony Award for her trouble. Equally impressive was Nathan Lane as Nathan Detroit, though it must be admitted that little of his performance made it to the cast album.

Guys and Dolls is sometimes referred to as a "perfect" musical, but one of its imperfections is that it was written around the vocal limitations of Sam Levene, who created the role of Nathan Detroit. Levene was tone-deaf, and thus was given very little to do in the musical numbers. Lane is a much better singer, but the part is still musically bereft. On his one major song, essentially providing patter to Prince on "Sue Me," you can hear him turning his part into more of a singing one, but he just isn't on the record very much. Happily, Peter Gallagher, an actor not much known for singing, does well with Sky Masterson, who gets the big male songs like "Luck Be a Lady." The cast album adds a couple of instrumental dance pieces ("Havana," "The Crapshooters' Dance") and a few bits of dialogue. But like the onstage production, it is essentially similar to the original. No wonder, then, that the revival, which opened on April 14, 1992, ran 1,144 performances, almost as long as the original, and no wonder that the revival cast album is almost as good as the original, too.