The Revivals Of the Fittest

We've had half a century to get used to all of this. But even after the film and the hundred thousand high-school productions and the commercials that use "Somewhere," the show still feels fresh. Partly this is due to some savvy casting. If you haven't seen many fawning Q&As with the celebrities who were hired to punch up ticket sales, it's because there aren't any. A few names in the Playbill are familiar, but mainly this show will give its actors the biggest (and, if there's any justice, most glowing) notices of their young lives.

The revival also seems lively because of a tough-mindedness that's surprisingly current. By darkening a show that was pretty dark to begin with, Laurents has made it foreshadow more clearly than ever the worldly-wise future work of its lyricist, an upstart named Stephen Sondheim. "West Side Story" dares to insist that some problems cannot be solved quickly or wished away. At a moment when the news keeps us full of great hopes and fears, it feels irreducibly right for New York to have a story this bittersweet back in the heart of Times Square, where it belongs.

"Guys and Dolls" should, by rights, be an even greater boon to a gloomy town. This 1950 riff on stories by Damon Runyon may be, note for note, the funniest musical ever written, the inspired collaboration of songwriter Frank Loesser, librettist Abe Burrows and original director George S. Kaufman. The new revival, like the Spanish-laced scenes of "West Side Story," raises another pair of questions: (1) How did Loesser et al. cram so many good jokes, so many perfect songs, so many plot twists that work like a dream, into one musical? (2) How can a revival get it all so wrong?

Director Des McAnuff tries to play up the show's New York–ness, using video and other scenic elements to drape itself in Manhattan iconography: not just the sewer where Sky Masterson (Craig Bierko) and the crapshooters sing "Luck Be a Lady Tonight," but a subway entrance, an automat and the Flatiron Building. But the video projections look synthetic, lifeless—like "Grand Theft Auto: Old-Timey Midtown." And the sets look less like seedy old Manhattan than the corporate Times Square of today. That's not a compliment.

All these exertions suggest that the show's creative team doesn't trust the material. So, in its way, does the casting of Hollywood's Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham as Nathan Detroit and Adelaide. Neither is bad, exactly, but they're definitely not right for the roles, and they share a cartoony approach to the rat-a-tat Runyon-speak that makes their street-smart characters sound sorta dumb. Most egregiously, McAnuff has burdened this precision-engineered comedy with an actor playing Runyon himself. It serves mainly to keep the first solid laugh from arriving until (by my watch) 8:13. George S. Kaufman, charter member of the Algonquin Round Table and one of the people most responsible for the wisecracking New York style, would never stand for this.

In its choice of fake history over real history, its reliance on celebrity, even its mania for overbuilding, the revival embodies some of the less attractive values of boom-era New York, a chapter in the city's history that is closing fast. (Maybe this is why it feels so old.) Broadway musicals aren't meant to be sociological studies, of course—they're shows. But if you doubt that a masterpiece can wind itself into the very fabric of the city it depicts, listen closely the next time one of the newer subway trains leaves a station on Manhattan's West Side, and to the familiar melody it inadvertently sings: the first three notes of "Somewhere."

© 2009