She’s funny, adroit physically, and she sings “squeak-prano,” spiking songs with high-pitched injections that are in tune. Kuehn’s Miss Adelaide would steal the show. In probably any other production, Veronica J. The Old Globe/Asolo rendition not only gives it the size, the voices doing Loesser’s requisite legato, and the spectacle, under Sinai Tabak’s musical direction, it’s got one of the finest pit orchestras I’ve heard in San Diego. But it’s produced more in colleges than on a big stage (the last one I saw was at a high school, where my niece rocked the boat to heaven as Nicely Nicely). Guys and Dolls is one of the great American musicals (number one, many contend). Except for Nathan Detroit’s maroon and red-striped billboard of a suit, most are blends of checkerboard plaids. Hemesath’s costumes aren’t brash, cartoony reds and yellows from the Dick Tracy School of Bas Couture. Theirs is more ingrained and less affected than the original. The gangsters speak Runyonese but not like parroting robots. But purists, for whom change is anathema, may object to some of the Old Globe/Asolo Repertory Theatre’s choices. Rhodes’s intro is a surprise and a delight. And the homeless man asking for food? In cahoots with the woman selling recycled apples. Surely the sailors on shore leave in dress whites are who they are, and that harried woman (Linda Libby, a hoot) obviously a tourist who sees predators amidst the prey: beneath those two nuns’ habits? Gangsters. As they kaleidoscope around the stage, about half are not what they seem. With set designer Lee Savage’s flashy neon backdrop (an anatomy of glitzy Broadway marquees), the cast wends and wanders near the Save-a-Soul Mission, at 409 49th Street.

Instead of the traditional, roughly five-minute overture, director/choreographer Josh Rhodes gives us Runyonland in the flesh. The Old Globe’s Guys and Dolls opens with the unexpected. Runyonland, in short, is the Big Apple, 1950, through the looking glass. But after a few Bacardi-laced dulce de leches, Sarah flip-flops so much, if she were a salad she’d be “splashing my dressing.”Īnd Nathan Detroit, as confirmed a bachelor as they come, may abandon his 14-year engagement and marry patience-personified Miss Adelaide. Slick, devilish Sky falls for Miss Sarah Brown, the last woman on Earth he’d choose (come on, even Marian the Librarian might catch his eye quicker than the rigid Salvation Army sergeant). Not only that, Sky Masterson’s real name is Obadiah, which means “servant of the Lord.” We are in “Runyonland,” where things reside somewhere between upside and down, where a crap game’s a modern dance/ballet, and where Adelaide can sing about denying a man her body (“Take Back Your Mink”) while performing a striptease at the Hot Box. Except for hints of off-stage trouble - one would not want to tell Big Jule his dice do not have dots - most come off as vaguely innocent. Abe Burrows, who re-wrote Swerling’s threadbare libretto, said the essence of Guys and Dolls “was that these bums act like they were written by Noel Coward.” And they aren’t just pseudo-cultured. In a sense, Guys and Dolls reconciled the great divide of Loesser’s youth: high- versus low-brow.

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