New Musical in Manhattan

Guys and Dolls (music & lyrics by Frank Loesser; book by Jo Swerling & Abe Burrows; produced by Feuer & Martin) whizzes through the whole first act hardly once having to stop for a light. If the second act slows thing's up a bit, Guys and Dolls emerges a thoroughly good, lively, lowdown musical. Using fleece-lined tough material of Damon Runyon's, it takes a full-in-the-face but indulgent view of Broadway's cop-fleeing dice players and their dolls. What results, if not always authentic, is raffish and picturesque, and though it seems ground out here & there, at least it is freshly ground.

There are two leading guys. One, Nathan Detroit (Sam Levene), manages floating crap games and has been affianced for 14 years to a nightclub singer (Vivian Elaine) who longs for "a home with wall paper and bookends." The other guy, Sky Masterson (Robert Alda), will bet on any thing -- even that he can persuade a "Save-A-Soul Mission" lassie (Isabel Bigley) to go with him to Havana. While the law is missing out on dice games in sewers and Salvationist missions, love gets Sky firmly into its clutches, and leaves him out to make converts rather than points.

Equipped with a rousing new hymn called Follow the Fold, the Salvationists lend a homely charm to proceedings that are otherwise notably secular. Frank Loesser's score, though not unusually accomplished, is wonderfully appropriate: it has the blare of the story, the directness of the dances, the brassiness of the locale. One or two love songs would scarcely be missed; one or two of the ditties, such as Adelaide's Lament, have lively tunes. Michael Kidd's dances are clean and sharp, whether burlesquing honky-tonk routines or pantomiming the drama of dice games.

But the going is really smooth and the atmosphere really lively because Guys and Dolls belongs with the few musicals in any decade that can beam rather than swear at their librettos. Helped immensely at the source by Damon Runyon and in the staging by George S. Kaufman, the Jo Swerling-Abe Burrows book offers gags that don't seem like pressed four-leaf clovers, a lingo full of amusing genteelisms, humor that is disarming, good humor that is pervasive. Guys and Dolls would be virtually a model of its type if it were less insistent, or more convincing, about love.

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