Jive time: Claire Sweeney and Patrick Swayze |
Feel good with Guys and Dolls
GUYS AND DOLLS
Piccadilly Theatre
THE Donmar’s production of Guys and Dolls continues in a revitalised edition at the Piccadilly. And it went down a storm.
After Neil Morrissey and Ewan McGregor comes Adam Cooper as Sky Masterson and Patrick Swayze’s Nathan Detroit is as good as I’ve seen.
Here are saints and sinners saving reluctant souls – all desperately looking for a safe haven, all sunk in the mire. There is an irrepressible vitality of Time Square with bawdy burlesque chorus girls, Jewish delicatessens, late late nights and corrupt cops.
Ms Adelaide (Claire Sweeney) has been “engaged” to Sky for 13 years, writing letters to her mother in Rhode Island about her fictitious family of five children, desperate to enter the state of matrimony.
Kelly Price, as Sarah Brown, struggles valiantly heading the Save the Soul mission and with whom Nathan becomes besotted.
Sarah catches that fatal disease ‘love’. Price is a girl to keep your eye on.
Frank Loesser’s score thrusts rather than teases. This is some of the robust singing and dancing currently in the West End, not just from the girls in the Hotbox but the compulsive gamblers particularly while they are playing in the New York sewers.
Big Jule (Nick Cavaliere) from Chicago is straight out of The Sopranos. Martyn Ellis, who plays the character Nicely Nicely Johnson, stopped the show with Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat.
These are some of the tenderest songs of the 1950s genre.
The pace is fast and furious but when it momentarily halts it shows. And Sweeney, an established talent, pulled off Take Back Your Hat like a real Broadway broad.
Ok, I saw it at the Coliseum in 1953 and saw Richard Eyre’s production in 1982. This is an evening to enjoy, a shared pleasure all coming out into a world that seems to be getting bleaker. If ‘feel good’ is what you want, get yourself down to the Piccadilly Theatre.
Until Jan 2007
CNJ booking line: 0870 040 0070
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