“Guys and Dolls”: A Musical Fable of Broadway

Frank Loesser (1910-69) belongs to that sparsely populated circle of American songwriters from the pre-rock era who wrote both music and lyrics to their songs; he was a man of prodigious talents and accomplishments. His older brother, Arthur, had a distinguished career as a concert pianist, teacher and author, a fact that once prompted Frank to jokingly refer to himself as "the evil of two Loessers." In fact, he demanded of himself the uncompromising standards that elevate him to a position of preeminence in the arena of the American musical theater. Loesser never repeated himself or fell victim to formulas; each artistic and box office success only led him to strike out in a new direction. Where's Charley (1948), an old-fashioned farce, was succeeded by Guys & Dolls (1950), which presented a radically different story and set of characters. The Most Happy Fella (1956) was based on Sidney Howard's gripping drama "They Knew What They Wanted." Loesser transformed it into a musical drama of operatic proportions. How To Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961) was adapted from Shepherd Mead's best seller of the same loquacious title. It was a spoof of the corporate world that featured a "hero" who was a conniving brat-not the material out of which successful Broadway musicals are usually made. It won a Pulitzer Prize. Loesser's most famous work and, arguably, his best is Guys & Dolls. The original production ran for almost three years on Broadway. There followed a London production, an all-black cast production, a movie version, innumerable productions in supper clubs and summer stock companies across the country, countless amateur performances on college and high school campuses, and it was very successfully revived on Broadway in 1992. There is no means of verifying this, but Guys & Dolls may be the most performed musical ever. This article examines Guys & Dolls in the attempt to uncover some of the secrets of its magic. The Genre Guys & Dolls: A Musical Fable of Broadway, opened in New York on November 24, 1950, and had a run of 1,200 performances. The music and lyrics were the work of Frank Loesser; the Book was written by Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling;' George S. Kaufman was the director. Guys & Dolls is a hybrid musical theater piece in the sense that it combines elements of both musical comedy and musical play.2 The basic thrust of a musical comedy is to present a succession of song types-ballads, duets, pattersmixed with concerted numbers, dances and humor. These are strung out on what is usually a tenuous story line involving two pairs of lovers, one romantic, the other more lighthearted, and a cast of colorful supporting characters. Cole Porter's Anything Goes (1934) is a superlative example of the genre. A musical play uses many of the same ingredients, but places greater emphasis on the development of characters and the exposition of a believable, cohesive story: actions, spoken lines and songs are closely interrelated and develop organically. Such is the case with Jerome Kern's/Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat (1927), to cite but one of many fine examples of this genre. Historically, musical comedies have produced more hit songs than have musical plays (though there are numerous exceptions to this general rule). This is not due to a difference in quality: songs from musical comedies are not necessarily better than those from musical plays. It has to do, rather, with a difference in function and context. Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You" has been recorded many times by dozens of singers over the course of several decades. It is a wonderful song, but its raison d'etre is not limited to the characters who sing it in Anything Goes. The song has a life of its own, divorced from that musical comedy, and can be successfully performed outside that context. In contrast, many fine songs, integral to the musical plays for which they were written, have little chance of becoming hits in the broader commercial market because they are too closely wedded to specific characters and situations. …