Take a closer look at the world of Guys and Dolls. Click on one of the links below to read articles featured in Court's Chicago Plays program.

THE TIMELESSNESS OF GUYS AND DOLLS

THE MAN WHO RHYMED BARBASOL: FRANK LOESSER

CRAPS

THE WORLD OF DAMON RUNYON

REMEMBERING THE QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN MUSICAL

SUGGESTED READING

THE TIMELESSNESS OF GUYS AND DOLLS

Almost from its opening on Broadway in 1950, Guys and Dolls became one of the most beloved and inventive musicals in the American theatre. Frank Loesser’s songs, the swirling love story, and the nostalgic Times Square setting helped make it the fifth-longest running musical of the fifties. When the musical was adapted to screen a few years later starring Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, it became an American classic.

Based on a group of Damon Runyon short tales, it is a “fable” of legendary New York of the twenties and thirties, when American writers were inventing Broadway and beginning to set themselves apart from the Brits. Runyon shares with F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, a preoccupation with inventing yourself and with class. Whereas Fitzgerald looks at this subject despairingly, Runyon, takes a more optimistic point of view, albeit one from the bottom up. His characters, ethnic gangsters and low-level Broadway showgirls, are struggling to make it. Some of them do, although sometimes in ways that their mothers would disapprove of.

Still, this and many other of Runyon’s nuances did not survive in the 1950 musical. Indeed, Guys and Dolls arrived on stage far from its original collaborators’ intents. Producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin originally envisioned the musical as a serious story. After hiring composer and lyricist Frank Loesser, they went through 11 librettists before deciding to turn the project into a comedy. They enlisted veteran screenwriter Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, a radio and television writer with no theatrical experience.

Eventually, the team came up with a highly theatrical romantic comedy. They believed the sources demanded it. Drawn most famously on Runyon’s story, “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” the plot follows Nathan Detroit, the organizer of “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.” Detroit bets fellow gambler Sky Masterson that he can’t make the next woman he sees fall in love with him. That woman is Miss Sarah Brown, a Salvation Army reformer, and a poignant and funny series of events unravels.

Rather than try and stage the 1950 musical as a period piece, Court Theatre’s Guys and Dolls turns more intently to Runyon, to artists and writers of the twenties and thirties, and to the real-life stories that Runyon based his tales on.

In addition, Court’s production also treats Guys and Dolls as a serious dramatic text. In other words, we’ve explored the plays written in the same decade as the musical. This was the same era as Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Guys and Dolls shares a point of view with these works particularly in its obsession with identity.

At the same time, though, Guys and Dolls is contemporary because it tells the truth about men and women. Not the nineteen-fifties truth, but simply the truth. Opposites attract, then they repel. Those in love make each other wait. People lie. The possibility of love exists especially when you think it does not. Most tenderly, Guys and Dolls tells the story of what happens when suspicion damages the ability to trust. Of course, Guys and Dolls ends happily with two marriages, which is what makes it a comedy and a fun-loving timeless American musical.

-Rachel Shteir, Production Dramaturg

THE MAN WHO RHYMED BARBASOL: FRANK LOESSER

Born into a cultured, musical German family on June 29, 1910 in New York, Frank Henry Loesser spent his career investigating popular music. A leading songwriter for the stage, films and “Tin Pan Alley” from the 30s through to the 60s, he began by writing lyrics, but later in his career he composed music as well. During the Depression, following a brief spell at City College, New York, Loesser worked a variety of jobs including city editor for a local newspaper, jewelry salesman and waiter. His first published song, written with William Schuman in 1931, was “In Love with A Memory of You.” Loesser also wrote for vaudevillians and played piano in nightclubs on New York’s 52nd Street.

In 1936, Loesser contributed some lyrics to The Illustrators Show, a revue with music by Irving Actman, but the show closed after only five Broadway performances. The following year, he went to Hollywood and spent the next few years writing lyrics for the movies. Among the many composers he collaborated with are Burton Lane, Hoagy Carmichael, and Jules Styne. The songs he wrote during this era are numerous. One of them, “They're Either Too Young Or Too Old,” sung by Bette Davis, features a typically amusing Loesser lyric, the couplet: “I either get a fossil, or an adolescent pup/I either have to hold him off, or have to hold him up!”

Loesser spent three years as a private in the army. The first song for which he wrote both music and lyrics is “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” In the post-war era, his Hollywood training served him well on Broadway. His first major hit was the score for Where’s Charley?, a musical adaptation of Brandon Thomas’ English farce, Charley’s Aunt.

During the 1950s, Loesser wrote his greatest Broadway shows. In 1950, Guys And Dolls, a musical adaptation of a group of Damon Runyon stories opened to much acclaim. It is generally considered to be Loesser’s masterpiece. His next Broadway project was The Most Happy Fella, for which he also wrote the libretto. The show was adapted from Sidney Howard’s story “They Knew What They Wanted,” the tale of an elderly Italian wine grower living in California, who falls in love at first sight with a waitress. Loesser created what has been called “one of the most ambitiously operatic works ever written for the Broadway musical theatre.” Loesser’s last Broadway show, which opened in 1961, How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, satirized big business. The show became one of a few American musicals to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize; a film version was released in 1967.

Loesser died of lung cancer on July 28, 1969. By that time, Hair and the advent of rock and roll had changed the American musical forever. A lifelong smoker, with a volatile temperament, Loesser was one of the most innovative men of the American musical theatre, our Rossini.

-Rachel Shteir, Production Dramaturg

CRAPS

If all you know about craps is remembering an old army game played in the corner of a barracks in some 1940s movie starring Ronald Reagan and Van Johnson, you haven’t been to Las Vegas recently. The rise of Las Vegas as a major tourist destination has given that tarnished game of craps a whole new look. In casinos like the Bellagio and the Mirage, Craps has become respectable. The game is the same, only a few rules have changed to protect the honest suckers who travel to that Nevada destination every year. Instead of the dark sewers like you’ll see in Guys and Dolls, the game is played on big green, felt tables, marked with a layout on which the crapshooters can place their bets. Usually five or six people handle the game for the house—one is a stickman who handles the dice and the rest handle your money.

Craps at the Bellagio is fast and silent. There are many tables, but more often than not, you have to elbow your way in. If you’re watching, waiting your turn, there is inevitably someone standing next to you, willing to give you the benefit of their advice and experience. “The house has the edge every time.” This is not news since as we all know the house has the edge in every game played in Las Vegas. If it didn’t—there would be no reason for the place to exist. The odds are, in fact, 1 to 4 in the house’s favor.

The first thing you may want to know about the game is what are all those strange hieroglyphics on the table. Answer—they’re the ways you can bet. Placing bets in Craps can be as simple or as complicated as you choose to make it. There are over thirty different bets on a craps layout, but fewer than half a dozen offer the odds that make craps the game with the best value in the casino, exceeded only by blackjack when played by very knowledgeable players. While there are many betting options available, you only need to understand a few of them to play the game and have a bit of fun.

Craps is a game where you bet on the numbers you think the next roll of dice will produce. The player rolling the dice is the ‘shooter.’ The first roll is called the ‘come out’ roll. The opening bet in craps, placed just before the ‘come out’ roll, is the ‘pass line’ bet. The ‘pass line’ bet wins instantly if the ‘shooter’ rolls 7 or 11, and loses instantly if he or she rolls a 2 (snake eyes), 3 (cross eyes), or a 12 (box cars). If a 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10 is rolled, it becomes the ‘point.’ If the ‘shooter’ rolls that number again before rolling a 7, the ‘pass line’ bet wins; if he or she rolls a 7 first, though, the ‘pass line’ bet looses. A ‘pass line’ bet is not finished until either the ‘point’ or a 7 is rolled. When the ‘shooter’ loses, the round is over, and a new one starts with a new ‘shooter.’ There are countless other bets you can place, but the ‘pass line’ bet is one of the most popular, so we’ll stick with that.

Having learned the basic elements of the game, you can now approach the table with full confidence, knowing that your chances of winning some of that money aren’t too bad, and you’re now ready to roll the dice. You’ve been listening to the crowd, so you know the right phrases: “Baby needs a new pair of shoes” and “Eighter from Decatur.” You’ve even developed a system for yourself. If you bet a dollar on your first roll, and lose, you double your bet on the next roll. Eventually, you think you have to win, so what have you to lose? PLENTY, as they say in Vegas. Even your shirt.

As you walk away from the table a few hours later with a few less dollars in your pocket you wonder to yourself—GEE, it looked so easy in Guys and Dolls.

-Bill Massolia, Director of Marketing and Communications

THE WORLD OF DAMON RUNYON

American short-story writer, journalist and legendary reporter, Damon Runyon gained fame with his tales of gambling, racing and gangsters. Among Runyon’s best-known work is Guys and Dolls (1932), a collection of his stories written in Broadway and Yiddish slang, streetwise metaphors, and the present tense.

Runyon was born Damon Runyon on October 4, 1884, in Manhattan, Kansas, but he grew up in Pueblo, Colorado. His father, Alfred Lee Runyon, was a storyteller, itinerant printer, and publisher of smalltown newspapers. When Runyon was seven his mother died. While his father spent his free time in bars, Runyon mingled with the town’s criminals.

Expelled from the sixth grade, Runyon followed his father into the newspaper business. By the age of 15 he worked for the Pueblo Evening Press as a news reporter. Here he changed the spelling of his last name. In 1898 he enlisted for the Spanish-American war and was sent to the Philippines, where he began to write. After leaving the army Runyon worked as a journalist on small dailies including the Denver Post. In 1908 he became a director of the Denver Press Club. He began publishing verses and short stories in national magazines such as McClure’s and Harper’s Weekly. In 1911, he published his first book, a collection of poems. In 1910 he went to New York City to work for the Hearst daily, the New York American. To get material for his column, ‘The Mornin’s Mornin,’ he fraternized with Broadway’s most colorful characters. These columns would appear in book form in the 1930s.

In 1912 and 1916 Runyon served as a foreign correspondent in Mexico and in Europe. Back in New York, in the Jazz Age, Runyon developed his recognizable style. He covered the New York baseball clubs for many years, as well as various other sports venues, focusing on human details rather than facts. Runyon’s underworld stories became popular and his feature ‘As I See It’ was syndicated in the Hearst newspapers. At the peak of his career, he had a daily readership of over ten million.

The archetype of tough, cynical reporter who mingled with gangster and show people became part of Runyon’s public image. His characters, Lemon Drop Kid, Dave the Dude, Harry the Horse, Dream Street Rose, Izzy Cheesecake reflected and parodied city life’s colorful side. Indeed, Runyon’s fiction was natural for the big screen: sixteen stories and one play were turned into movies, including Sorrowful Jones, (1949) and The Lemondrop Kid, (1951). In 1950, Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows made Guys and Dolls into a Broadway musical. It was adapted for screen in 1955, starring Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra.

By the end of the 1930s, Runyon had become a celebrity. He held nightly meetings with friends and colleagues at Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway. During his lifetime Runyon crossed paths with some of history’s most notable figures. Al Capone, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Arnold Rothstein and Walter Winchell were among the people he called his friends. In 1938 Runyon developed throat cancer and in 1944 an operation left him unable to speak. But Runyon continued his meetings, communicating by written notes. He died on December 10, 1946. The first World War air ace Eddie Rickenbacker scattered his ashes over Broadway.

-Rachel Shteir, Production Dramaturg

REMEMBERING THE QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN MUSICAL

Guys and Dolls is one of the great successes of Broadway history. Now, 54 years old, it has delighted audiences for more than five decades and during that time almost everyone has at one time or another seen a production of this classic American musical or watched the film version. If you’re a web surfer and have typed in the key words, Guys and Dolls on Yahoo or Google you will be surprised to find over 160,000 websites devoted to this popular musical comedy. Over 75% of these sites are dedicated to productions of the musical ranging from high school and community theatre productions to other regional theatre productions around the country. Undoubtedly the number of productions of Guys and Dolls over the years could number in the hundreds of thousands. And easily, this means many of Court’s patrons have been involved with a production of Guys and Dolls of their own. So with that in mind, we asked our audience to tell us about their own production memories of this quintessential American musical.

Guys & Dolls holds a very special place in my heart. As a young actress in New York it was the first show I was hired to do (Adelaide), then I was hired again somewhere else (Adelaide again). There I met my husband who was the music director of that production. I was hired to do Adelaide again and during the run we became engaged. So aside from adoring the show it has been my personal good luck charm. Now I’m actually the right age for Adelaide, but I didn’t audition for you because my 10 year old son (carrying on the theatre tradition) was cast in his first show...The Christmas Schooner at Bailiwick. We did meet your Adelaide at the Thanksgiving parade...she is wonderful and we hope to catch your show!
-Dawn Hollis, Children’s Theatre Producer, Lake in the Hills, Age 42

My kids are now 14 and almost 18 years old and we will be happily attending your production next year. I first took my kids to a professional production of Guys and Dolls when they were around ages 5 and 9. My young son loved the production so much he started singing and bouncing along, much to the delight of some of my fellow theatre patrons, but to the dismay of others including his mortified and silently disapproving sister. A couple of near-by ladies were particularly impatient and became downright rude about the whole thing. As it was proving difficult to contain his enthusiasm, we ended up excusing ourselves and leaving right away. I handed our stubs to a few homeless people outside the theatre and hoped the ladies inside would enjoy their company much more than they had ours. Live and learn.
-Susan Casty, Age 49

Last year I participated in the Lincoln Jr. High production of Guys and Dolls. I played the role of Brandy Bottle Bates with few lines but many dances and songs. I really enjoy performing in front of the audience and showing my acting talents. It was fun picking out my suit for my gambler role. I bought a very bright, flashy yellow suit jacket. I have enjoyed many of the Court Theatre plays put on over the last few years and I am looking forward to seeing Guys and Dolls.
-Mark Ressl, Mount Prospect, Age 13

Guys and Dolls changed my brother’s life. The movie version contains an opening scene in which a parcel-burdened “Guy” trails his spend-free “Doll” as she strolls down the street. My brother, aged 6 or so, was so outraged by the woman’s smug smile as her fella struggled with her overflowing purchases, that he would verbally decry the injustice of it every time the scene played. I’m please to say that some 20 years later, he married a wonderfully independent woman who is more comfortable with a good hiking backpack than the latest purse. Better still, each moved across the country once to be together before they married, in perfect fairness.
-Caitlin Aptowicz, Graduate Student, University of Chicago, Age 28

I tried out for a community theatre production of Guys and Dolls the summer after I graduated from high school and was put into the chorus. Two weeks into rehearsal a couple of the “hot box girls” left the show and my friend and I were suddenly thrust into their roles. Before we knew it, it was time for our first rehearsal of “Take Back Your Mink.” I was eighteen. I was a former band and speech team nerd. Cute, but still a nerd. The entire time we rehearsed—and I mean the ENTIRE time—the director stood in front of the stage on the other side of the band pit and kept pointing at me and yelling ‘give me those bedroom eyes!’ I had no idea what he was talking about. I was truly clueless…and he was red in the face.
-Rosemary Caruk, Corporate Relations, University of Chicago, Evanston, Age 42

Our play reading theater group just celebrated our 50th anniversary. The group consists of 12 couples primarily from Winnetka. We first produced and performed Guys and Dolls in 1958 with the actors lip-syncing to a long playing record. Since that time we have produced it in 1993, and again this year. We now do it with live music and “real” singing. I personally have also appeared in the Winnetka Theater's production in 1984.
-Bill Leuter, Winnetka, Age 68

My brother, Tom and I played in the pit band for the Lourdes High School production of Guys and Dolls in April of 1972. The musicians were all asked to dress in character and this is a photo of it. We also did South Pacific and Stop The World—I Want to Get Off. I still love all three of those plays but Guys & Dolls is easily my favorite.
-Rich Grodek, Chicago

At the time our school was doing Guys and Dolls, the stage manager, prop manager, and myself were taking a chemistry class. We were working with a variety of chemicals at the time and there was one, butyric acid, which smelled horrible. We got the brilliant idea of running behind the sewer drop during the “Luck Be a Lady” number with a bottle of this chemical—sort of a sense-o-rama experience. On the night of the dress rehearsal, my friend carefully brought the bottle of butyric acid backstage. The bottle was un-stoppered and run behind the sewer drop a few times, then we watched from the wings. It went something like, “Luck be a Lady, SNIFF, tonight SNIFF SNIFF. Luck, SNIFF, be a Lady to-SNIFF-night...” Luckily, the song was not disrupted, the flow of the show didn’t suffer and no one was injured. I have gone on to do some professional shows and would never advocate anyone running around with smelly chemicals, even with supervision, but at the time it was priceless, kind of a ‘Revenge of the Stage Crew Nerds’or theatrical scratch-and-sniff.
-Annette Knitter, Rose Mortgage Corporation, Chicago, Age 43

My name is Anna Wegerson and I played Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. It was by far the most fun I’ve ever had on the stage. I went to Regina Dominican High School, an all-girls school in Wilmette. For our musical every fall, we usually cast men from nearby schools to play the parts of leading males in our productions. However, my senior year, our directors felt that they had the talent among us women to cast us in the male parts. The show could not have been more of a success, if I do say so myself, even if we did have to leave out certain romantic stage directions (such as kissing). Although there was reluctance on the part of our administration, us girls pulled off very convincing guys. We learned how to tie ties, throw punches, play craps, and walk, talk and sing like men. It was one of the best experiences of my life!
-Anna Wegerson, Student, Earlham College, Richmond, IN, Age 18

I am the Drama Director at Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette. We are an all-girls school with a long tradition of empowering our young women to pursue their dreams without regard to stereotypical constraints. In that spirit, we determined to produce Guys and Dolls. While our auditions are open to young men from area schools, we decided that we would cast roles based solely on ability, not gender. Just by chance, ALL of the male leads were filled by young girls. The rehearsal process was fun and enlightening as the girls consciously studied the movements and mannerisms of the young men in their lives. One father told how he was getting concerned with his daughter’s behavior until he realized that she was preparing to play Sky Masterson. Most people reported that they almost immediately forgot that they were watching girls play men as they became absorbed in the story, the music, and the dancing. The main complaint came from young women in the audience who were disappointed once they learned that the “hot” Sky Masterson was really a classmate of theirs. The show was a true success, not only for its artistic merit and the pleasure it brought the audience, but for the sense of accomplishment that our girls experienced.
-Dianne Weinand, Drama Teacher, Regina Dominican H.S., Wilmette

SUGGESTED READING

Guys and Dolls: The Stories of Damon Runyon by Damon Runyon

Making of Guys and Dolls by Keith Garebian

Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls
in His Life: A Portrait by His Daughter by Susan Loesser

Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making
of Broadway Culture by Daniel R. Schwarz

The Complete Lyrics of Frank Loesser compiled by Robert
Kimball (Editor) & Steve Nelson (Editor)