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Guys and Dolls
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Based on Damon Runyon's short story "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown," Guys and Dolls debuted on Broadway in 1950 and ran for 1,200 performances, the fifth-longest run in Broadway history. The story centers on Nathan Detroit (senior Dan Hirsh), proprietor of the longest-running floating craps game in New York City. Needing to raise $1,000 for a new location, Nathan bets high-roller Sky Masterson (music master's candidate Clark Sturdevant) that Sky can't take straitlaced mission worker Sarah Brown (senior Laura Ernst) to Havana for dinner. Complications ensue... as Sky develops genuine feelings for Sarah and the mission, saving few souls in raucous Times Square, faces imminent closure.
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Based Damon Runyon's short story The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown, Guys and Dolls first opened on Broadway in 1950, hitting the big screen five years later with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Jean Simmons. It's an all-singing, all-dancing tale of a high rolling gambler, Nathan Detoit, (played by Garry McDonald) who makes a bet that the next gal encountered by his crap-playing pal Sky Masterson (Ian Stenlake), won't fall in love with his friend.
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Although Guys and Dolls eventually became the fifth longest-running Broadway musical of the Fifties, it was a long and difficult road getting it to the stage at all. Producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin originally envisioned the musical as a serious romantic story along the lines of South Pacific. After hiring composer and lyricist Frank Loesser, they eventually went through 11 librettists before finally deciding to make the project a comedy and settling on Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, a radio and television writer with no theatrical experience.
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After its opening in November 1950, "Guys and Dolls" became one of Broadway's most enduring successes, running 1,200 performances and enjoying successful revivals all over the world, including three on Broadway alone. The show was miraculously able to mock the desperate denizens of Dream Street and celebrate them at the same time; it took Runyon's Broadway of legend and turned it into a legend of Broadway.
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Guys and Dolls is a "fairy tale of New York", peopled with sidewalk gamblers who, in their hilarious stilted diction and their elaborate etiquette, could rival in formality the courtiers at Versailles. Grandage's production pitches perfectly the show's delicious mix of urban knowingness and pastoral innocence.
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For the City Center revival of Guys and Dolls, he received his first Tony Award nomination, for Best Featured Actor (Musical). Merrick would tap him in 1980 to play driven Broadway director Julian Marsh in the smash hit 42nd Street. . For Chicago, singing "Razzle Dazzle," among other Kander and Ebb songs, he was nominated for a Best Actor (Musical) Tony Award.
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Guys and Dolls