Shakespeare Theatre Company’s ‘Guys and Dolls’
By • December 18, 2025 0 113
Whisked from Times Square’s spartan Save-A-Soul Mission to a glittering Havana nightspot, Miss Sarah Brown asks her escort, “former sinner” (his words) Sky Masterson, the name of her beverage’s delightful “flavoring.”
His answer, “Bacardi,” goes right over — and right to — her head. Soon plastered amid mambo-ing couples, Miss Sarah ends up on a bench in the wee hours, singing out “If I Were a Bell.” One of composer Frank Loesser’s subtly risqué lyrics: “Well, if I were a salad I know I’d be splashing my dressing.”
“For a moment,” writes Shakespeare Theatre Company Artistic Producer and Dramaturg Drew Lichtenberg in a “Guys and Dolls” program note, “virtue dances cheek to cheek with vice.”
The scene in the Havana club — with a backdrop of hanging tinsel by designer Walt Spangler, vibrant dancing choreographed by Joshua Bergasse, Latin music from a crack 21-piece orchestra (behind a scrim, alas) led by James Lowe and a brawl by fight choreographer Robb Hunter — is an act-one highlight of STC’s production, directed by Washington National Opera Artistic Director Francesca Zambello.
Washington Post critic Naveen Kumar was apparently put off by this alcohol-fueled seduction, which might not have disturbed him and others (yours truly included) if Julie Benko as Miss Sarah had become merely tipsy, more drunk on love than on rum.
But alcohol is essential to the early 1930s milieu, with the Depression in full swing and Prohibition on its last legs. (One would expect clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke, but there’s none of that.) The “oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York,” run by the oafish Nathan Detroit, played by Rob Colletti, can’t move to McCloskey’s Bar because “Mrs. McClosky ain’t a good scout.”
And a verse in “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” — unquestionably the production’s showstopper, sung by Kyle Taylor Parker as Nicely-Nicely Johnson — goes: “I sailed away on that little boat to heaven/And by some chance found a bottle in my fist/And there I stood nicely passin’ ’round the whiskey/But the passengers were bound to resist.”
The show’s lingo is known as “Runyonese” for writer Damon Runyon. The nicknamed denizens of his short stories about the New York underworld, and his unnamed narrator, expressed their rough-and-tumble selves in present tense-only, contraction-less, oddly formal verbiage.
An example from “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” of 1933, which with “Blood Pressure” and “Pick the Winner” constituted the source material for “Guys and Dolls”: “Well, when word goes around that The Sky is up at Nathan Detroit’s crap game trying to win Brandy Bottle Bates’ soul for Miss Sarah Brown, the excitement is practically intense.”
Jo Swerling’s book was rewritten by famed script doctor Abe Burrows, head writer of the 1940s radio program “Duffy’s Tavern.” “The people on that show were New York mugs,” said Burrows, “nice mugs, sweet mugs, and like Runyon’s mugs they all talked like ladies and gentlemen.”
Kyle Taylor Parker as Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “Guys and Dolls.” Photo by Teresa Castracane. Courtesy STC.
The New York-iest character is Nathan’s long-suffering fiancée, Miss Adelaide, star of the Hot Box, played with gusto, sniffles and tears by Hayley Podschun. The little strip club stage with a neon marquee comes up on a lift for her and her troupe to perform “A Bushel and a Peck” and, even better, “Take Back Your Mink.”
From different worlds, Miss Sarah and Miss Adelaide team up for a winning duet, just before the closing reprise of the song “Guys and Dolls.” The most flavorful word in the show spills out in the lyrics to “Marry the Man Today”: Ovaltine. Along with Reader’s Digest and Guy Lombardo, the powdered chocolate and malt mix — originally developed in 1904 by Swiss chemist Albert Wander — is one of the “better things” to which the Misses plan to slowly introduce their husbands-to-be: Sky, charismatically played by Jacob Dickey, and Nathan.
All four leads have Broadway credits and are appearing with STC for the first time (the same goes for Parker). An unexpected pleasure came in act two, when Lawrence Redmond — a nine-time Helen Hayes nominee who has won twice — as Miss Sarah’s grandfather sang the traditionally croaked-out “More I Cannot Wish You” in full voice, with support from flute, clarinet and bowed bass. Other D.C.-based pros in the cast: Ahmad Kamal as Big Jule and Holly Twyford as Gen. Matilda B. Cartwright.
Most of the show takes place in a large room that represents the Save-A-Soul Mission and, in a framing device, a “present day nonprofit thrift store … that serves as a kind of portal,” in Zambello’s words. The Hot Box rises, as noted, and huge horizontal pipes are lowered after the crapshooters “descend” (through a trapdoor) to the sewers. The crowd-wowing acrobatics in “The Crapshooters’ Dance,” to an instrumental version of “Luck Be a Lady” brought to mind the “The Barn-Raising Dance” in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”
Runyon, who died of throat cancer in 1946, never saw “Guys and Dolls,” which opened on Broadway four years later. The exceptionally gifted Loesser went on to write the music and lyrics of the 1961 hit “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” with a book co-written by Burrows.
Guys and Dolls
Through Jan. 8
Shakespeare Theatre Company
Harman Hall, 610 F St. NW
