Guys & Dolls

Guys & Dolls has been called ‘the perfect musical’ ever since its premiere in 1950.  It isn’t ‘challenging’ and not even ‘relevant’, but it is certainly one of the greatest, most enduring American music theatre pieces, up there with the work of Rodgers & Hammerstein, Bernstein, Kander & Ebb, Sondheim, et al. – and revived over and over.  It has songs you’re humming on the way home, with clever lyrics you remember; it’s funny and witty, and it has an ever developing, clever plot that doesn’t waste a minute. 

Set in Prohibition New York and based on stories by Damon Runyon -The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown, Blood Pressure and a bit of Pick the Winner - the songs, score, dialogue and humour all hew to the distinctive Runyon-esque milieu of grifters, gamblers, goodtime dolls, and small-time crooks.

Two intertwined love story plot lines hold the show together and provide the up-ending - the proof that when guys are doing crazy stuff, they’re always ‘doin’ it for some doll’.  There’s Hot Box nightclub chanteuse Miss Adelaide (Willow Sizer), engaged for fourteen years to nervous floating crap game operator Nathan Detroit (Shannon Foley), and there’s Salvation Army officer Miss Sarah Brown (Maddison Coleman), who, much against her principles, falls for suave, smooth sinner and big-time gambler Sky Masterson (Javon King).  But in this production, the subsidiary characters are hugely entertaining too.  Bugs Baschera is a comic delight as Nicely Nicely Johnson, likewise Joey Phyland’s Harry the Horse and Angelo Vasilakakos’ Benny Southstreet.  It is, true, a bit of a disappointment that Antipodes regular, the phenomenon that is Kikki Temple, as the Hot Box MC and Salvation Army General Cartwright, doesn’t have more to do.

With a cast of seventeen and a great onstage band of seven (musical director David Butler), it’s a crowded stage.  In the first half, Carolyn Ooi’s and Celina Yuen’s choreography and Jonathan Homsey’s movement direction might be a little too busy, but location switches are smooth, and things settle down in the second half and it all comes together triumphantly with ‘Luck Be a Lady (Tonight)’ and the rousing ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat’.

If Bianca Pardo’s imaginative set is constrained by budget and the costumes are a bit ‘bring-your-own’, and the production overall doesn’t quite live up to the extravagant claims made for it in the publicity and the program, the show nevertheless fulfils Antipodes stated purpose: to include ‘emerging artists or people who have not yet been afforded mainstream performance opportunities.‘  Here the casting is diverse, certainly ‘different’, often surprising but also inclusive and provocative.  Why can’t anyone fall in love with anyone else?  Directors Trudy Dunn and Brando Pape ensure that everyone gives it all they’ve got, and everything is delivered with such commitment and enthusiasm that the text (and there’s not a word changed) and the music carry all before it. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: 3 Fates Media