>>REVIEW
GUYS AND DOLLS
Runs until April 22
Theatre Calgary
Max Bell Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Does the world really need another production of Guys and Dolls? More to the point, in a season that’s been bursting at the stitches with provocative, original art, does Calgary?
Artists and their impresarios are under constant pressure to be relevant. Wouldn’t a musical about single mothers trying to find low-cost housing on Calgary’s current mean streets be a lot more of a contribution than a 56-year-old Broadway musical about the hunt to house a floating craps game in New York? Can a production in which the men smarmily refer to all women as "dolls" justify its life in world of vagina monologues on the one hand and bitches and ho’s on the other?
I could offer you a long disquisition here on the ways in which Guys and Dolls is, in fact, still resonant today. I could write 10,000 words on how it’s vastly more interesting, sexual-politics-wise, than, say, Hustle and Flow (at least the women in G&D have a voice, for pimp’s sake). But what makes Guys and Dolls sustainable is also what’s most important about it. It’s good. It’s very good.
Good writing, good pacing, good structure: a musical like this makes these things look easy. They’re not. Critics have often referred to Guys and Dolls as the best musical of all time. They certainly have a point. It’s extremely funny without relying on that cloying zaniness so common in the field (the kind that leaves you with a vaguely sick feeling, like you’ve been forced to watch your parents get drunk). It’s pleasingly fast-paced, but without the manic quality of those monster shows of the ‘80s and ‘90s in which a number wasn’t a number unless at least 10 people were singing different things at once. It manages to feel both tight and loose at the same time. It hums.
It’s been said that Guys and Dolls is so well written that no director can screw it up. Robb Paterson doesn’t try. He wisely sticks to the basics, mining the dialogue and the songs for their inherent comedy or pathos and letting his performers ham but never hog the spotlight.
The two female leads, in particular, are spectacular in completely different ways. As Sarah Brown, the prissy missionary intent on saving the dissolute gamblers on "the devil’s own street," Mairi Babb is irresistible. I’m not normally a fan of good-girl-lets-her-hair-down plotlines, but this is one of the originals, and Babb’s rendition of "If I Were a Bell" is adorably hilarious. For her part, Jennifer Lyon delivers the salty cabaret singer Miss Adelaide with the comic chops of a truly great dame of the stage. "Miss Adelaide’s Lament" is one of the cleverest songs in the history of Broadway, period, and Lyon, at least for the night, makes it her own.
Paterson’s been wise, too, in casting Gordon Tanner and John Devorski, both strong dramatic actors, as the male leads. The story rarely feels like a way to kill time between songs.
There are less memorable moments, certainly, and the "straight" love plot is more difficult to swallow than its comic counterpart. But the costumes, the dancing, the live orchestra, the acting and, pre-eminently, the writing… there’s something bracing about seeing a great work of art done well. Consider it a spring-cleaning of the soul. You can go relevant again tomorrow. |
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