Theater: A high-stepping 'Guys and Dolls'
By Matt Wolf International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2005
LONDON Ewan McGregor's stage musical debut is the nominal occasion of the new West End revival of "Guys and Dolls," the beloved Broadway classic that has long been a particular British favorite as well, and here are the answers to questions people may have been saving up about the "Star Wars" saber rattler: can he sing? (Well enough, barring a few flat patches.) Dance? (Very well indeed.) Act? (Beautifully, but that much we knew.)
But the even greater pleasures of the production, which opened Wednesday at the Piccadilly Theatre, pertain not to any individual cast member but to the event as a whole. As directed by Michael Grandage, an Englishman who has worked mostly in the not-for-profit theater, and choreographed by Rob Ashford, an American well-versed in Broadway's hurly-burly, this "Guys and Dolls" joins forces to create something new from a time-honored title: a show steeped in truth that is nonetheless shot through with pizzazz.
There were those in London who questioned the advisability of this show right now. After all, the specter still hangs heavily of Richard Eyre's famous production of the same musical in 1982, which marked the first time that the high-flown National Theatre allowed - gasp! - a Broadway musical to invade its perch. And though 23 years is a long time, especially in show biz, Eyre remounted his own production again at the National in 1996, with the recent Oscar nominee Imelda Staunton ("Vera Drake") heading a much lauded cast.
This latest version, though, is a commercial entry, notwithstanding Grandage's other life as artistic director of the studio-sized Donmar Warehouse Theatre, which is about as uncommercial a proposition as one could get. The result is a marriage almost as happy as the two couplings that conclude the show. What emerges is the attention to detail and text - and acting finesse - for which Grandage is known, alongside that inescapable wow factor provided by Ashford, when the entire ensemble starts moving at a pace that often seems faster than the speed of light.
You don't necessarily associate dance first off with "Guys and Dolls," even though the veteran choreographer Michael Kidd staged the musical numbers for its 1950 Broadway debut. (That production came to London in 1953.) A half-century later, it's the footwork that is fanciest about a show that still today seems fresh. When McGregor's Sky Masterson, for instance, whisks Sarah Brown (Jenna Russell) from Times Square to a date in Havana, the stage suddenly explodes into a sultry, witty Latin whirl of raging passions and raised limbs.
Back in Manhattan, Sky's fellow crapshooters turn a subterranean sewer into a perfectly synchronized cauldron of swirling bodies, McGregor's most commendably among them. (The actor is smart enough to know which passages to sit out.) Even "Marry the Man Today," a cunning duet for the show's two female leads, ends with an apt explosion of dance between the two, their sisterhood cemented as their feet take flight.
The result must be one of the most excitingly danced musicals the West End has ever seen, especially since choreography has not traditionally been an English theater forte. (No wonder the "Guys and Dolls" producers imported an American to do the job.) And the emphasis on movement only adds to the impression that a show almost never out of view has nonetheless been conceived anew, as a sizzling, high-stepping entertainment very much of today.
Certainly both sexes can relate in various ways to the prolonged courtship of the gambler Nathan Detroit (Douglas Hodge, overdoing the wide-eyed goofball routine) and his fiancée of nearly 15 years, Miss Adelaide (Jane Krakowski), a trip to the altar so attenuated that Adelaide has had to tell her mother in Rhode Island that the couple have five children (and a sixth on the way) in order to keep her sweet.
Adelaide, of course, is the Hot Box girl with the heavy cold brought on by Nathan's fear of commitment, and the blonde-wigged Krakowski - like Ashford, a Broadway import with a Tony Award to her name - makes her adenoidal lamentations unusually touching as well as sexy. Suffice it to say that this Hot Box generates sufficient heat that one wonders whether Adelaide's sniffles haven't been induced by one striptease too many. "Take Back Your Mink" here takes a squeaky comic number to unusually fleshy lengths, even if Adelaide remains a good girl at heart with eyes - and a body - reserved only for Nathan. (One quibble: Krakowski looks so young that one has to question at what inordinately youthful age this liaison actually began.)
A musical about love, long-incubating and instant, finds McGregor and Russell ideally matched as the subsidiary couple who take the spotlight, not least because of McGregor's star name. (That, too, helped explain a pre-opening advance sale in the region of $14 million.) Of the four principals, Russell is most extensively versed in London musicals, and she brings a firm voice and some astute acting to the job. The song "I'll Know," in which Sarah makes plain her certitude regarding the ways of the heart, ends on just the right ambiguous note, as if a prim and proper gal, suddenly confronted with a dream guy, isn't sure at all.
McGregor looks great in his various suits and wears a fedora well, that famous grin poking out from beneath to add further wattage to the designer Christopher Oram's glistening monochrome sets. A practiced smoothie, his Sky does much of his romancing against the backdrop of a milky-colored moon. But if his affections for Sarah begin as part of a bet, this is one high-roller who hasn't reckoned on the ways of the heart. And as he walks to the very lip of the stage to sing "Luck Be a Lady," there won't be anyone in the audience who isn't rolling snake eyes with him.
