A disappointing 'Guys and Dolls' hits Times Square

Director Des McAnuff has put together a perpetual-motion, high-concept, high-tech revival of "Guys and Dolls." Unfortunately, the curiously bland results don't translate into high entertainment.

What's missing in this ambitious production, which opened Sunday at Broadway's Nederlander Theatre, is the raffish charm — and more importantly — the brash humor of Damon Runyon's stories about the high and low-life denizens of Times Square.

This "Guys and Dolls" certainly looks glitzy enough, thanks to Robert Brill's neon-inundated settings and the dizzy, ever-moving video backdrops, mostly of New York, by Dustin O'Neill. Theatergoers who suffer from motion sickness are hereby warned.

Give McAnuff credit for not attempting a mausoleum-like replication. He frames the busy evening with Runyon himself, sitting down at a typewriter and pounding out the story of Mission doll Sarah Brown and her involvement with unrepentant gambler Sky Masterson. It's paired with the more comic tale of Nathan Detroit and his persistent attempts to evade marriage to his long-suffering and forever sniffling girlfriend, Miss Adelaide.

You can't help having some fun with these couples. After all, the show is "Guys and Dolls," an American musical-theater classic with surefire ingredients: Frank Loesser's witty, effortless lyrics and his insistently hummable melodies tied to a nearly infallible book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows.

That book doesn't seem so sturdy here, with stretches of dead time when Nathan and Adelaide are bickering. Much of their stage business falls flat due to the surprisingly lackluster performances of Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham.

Graham's Adelaide can sing and look sexy but it isn't enough. But what Faith Prince's Adelaide added to the sterling 1992 revival (besides being blissfully funny) was an underlying poignancy. Prince found the humanity that should frame the comedy in this woman's sweet desperation to get married after a 14-year — and counting — engagement.

Platt's Nathan is cautious rather than comic, delivering jokes that should seem breezy but evaporate without much of a ripple in his careful performance.

Strangely enough, for a show filled with raucous merriment, its most satisfying moments are the more romantic ones — the songs sung by Sarah Brown and Sky Masterson, played by Kate Jennings Grant and Craig Bierko. Their joyous rendition of "I've Never Been in Love Before" lifts the spirits, as does Grant's rendition of "If I Were a Bell" and Bierko's booming version of "Luck Be a Lady."

The musical's inevitable showstopper, "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat," still does the trick, with Tituss Burgess (as Nicely-Nicely Johnson) giving a rousing rendition of the song and Mary Testa (as the Mission's General Cartwright) almost stealing the number out from under him.

One of McAnuff's conceits is to move "Guys and Dolls" from post-World War II New York (1950) to the 1930s when Runyon wrote many of his Times Square stories. Adelaide has become a burlesque queen although her stripping, done to Sergio Trujillo's choreography, is uninspired, not to mention fairly chaste.

Yet Trujillo produces sizzle with his sexy Havana dance number when Sky and Sarah have an evening rendezvous in Cuba. There's also more kinetic energy in his crapshooters' dance, an athletic explosion led by John Selya.

But theatrical explosions are rare in this revival, a "Guys and Dolls" in need of a little rafter-raising soul-saving itself.