Got Moxie?

Guys and Dolls has been a nostalgia entry from day one. Written in 1950 but based on a Damon Runyon story published nearly 20 years earlier, this evergreen show has always taken a fond, backward glance.

The current production—ensconced at the mammoth 2,300-seat Sacramento Community Center Theatre through Sunday, sponsored by the Broadway Series—is no exception. When the curtain rises and star Maurice Hines appears alone on stage, he points up and—shazzam—illuminates electric signs promoting largely bygone brand names.

(Actually, the show’s lyrics make so many dated references that it might not be a bad idea for the producers to offer a small glossary for the benefit of those under 40, and those who didn’t grow up in the Big Apple. When was the last time you heard a person refer to the flu as “la grippe”? And how’s a West Coast native going to know that the A&P is a venerable grocery chain based in the New York metro area?)

But you know what? Antiques have charm, and that applies to American musicals as well as old chairs. This production of Guys and Dolls is old-fashioned in a rather good way—it relies almost entirely on dancing, singing and physical humor. In one funny scene, Hines, as gambler Nathan Detroit, chats with an auto mechanic on a pair of telephones with long, long cords—they eventually pass each other on stage. It’s rather refreshing to see a show that relies on such once-standard ingredients, rather than being dominated by over-engineered (and often over-promoted) special effects.

And the score yields several classics of their kind: “Luck Be a Lady,” “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat,” “A Bushel and a Peck.”

Since Guys and Dolls has been done by innumerable community theater groups from here to Timbuktu, most people are by now familiar with the two-part storyline. Ne’er-do-well Nathan Detroit has been promising to marry his sweetheart Miss Adelaide, an entertainer at the Hot Box nightclub, while high-roller Sky Masterson unexpectedly loses his heart to Sarah Brown, who runs an urban mission.

Hines is charming as Detroit. Diane Sutherland is winning as the strait-laced Brown, and Brian Sutherland (her real-life husband) looks handsome as Masterson—though I would have liked a bit more air of dubious menace from him at some point. Alexandra Foucard lays on the New York accent a little too thick as Adelaide, and squeaks when she sings. Chubby Clent Bowers makes the most of his big song as Nicely-Nicely Johnson.