76. "Guys and Dolls" in Philadelphia

COPYRIGHT © PETER SCHMITZ 2023. All Rights Reserved.

[AITH OPENING MUSIC]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History, where we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia, as we continue our Season Three, “The Tryout Town:”

This is another of our single-subject episodes that we’ve been trying out lately. In Episode 74 we brought you the Philadelphia story (as it were) of the world premiere of Kiss Me Kate, and this time we’ll talk about Philadelphia’s role in the creation of another classic mid-twentieth century American musical comedy - Guys and Dolls.

Now Guys and Dolls, one would think, has NOTHING to do with Philadelphia. Guys and Dolls is the quintessential NEW YORK musical, right? It is set in New York, all the action takes place in New York (save for a quick plane trip by two characters to Havana, Cuba - a VERY New York thing to do, at the time), most of the songs are sung in a New York-style dialect that we now call “Runyonesque,” after the All Present Tense, No-Contractions-Are-Allowed lingo employed by the journalist and writer Damon Runyon. Now famously Damon Runyon was even born in Manhattan - though we hasten to point out that it was technically Manhattan, KANSAS. Runyon, in fact, grew up in Colorado, but when he arrived in New York in 1910 at the age of 30, hired by the Hearst newspaper chain as a sports journalist he found himself totally in love with the place. He was one of those outsiders who quickly became COMPLETELY a New Yorker, hanging out with baseball players, boxers, gamblers, showgirls, gangsters, and (I’m sorry to report) even actors in nightclubs and speakeasies in and around Broadway.

And he would often populate his highly popular, distinctively-styled, fictional short stories with characters that had colorfully evocative names such as “Harry the Horse”, “Angie the Ox,” “Sam the Gonoph”, “Madame la Gimp”,  “Benny Southstreet”, “Big Jule”, “Little Isadore”, “Nicely Nicely Johnson” - and “Nathan Detroit.” Many of these short stories were published in a collection released  in 1931, called Guys and Dolls. When Runyon died in 1946, by a completely-beloved New York character himself, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered from a plane flying over Broadway.

So - again - nothing to do with Philadelphia! Although I do note that a couple of guys from Philly turned up on one of Runyon’s stories - a tale called “Gentlemen, the King” - their names were “Kitty Quick” and “Izzy Cheesecake” - and interestingly Ruynyon’s books were all published in Philadelphia (by the venerable firm of J.B. Lippincott & Co). But that’s about it.  

Three years later, in 1949, the Broadway producer Cy Feuer and Ed Martin approached the songwriter Frank Loesser, who had just written a musical starring Ray Bolger called Where’s Charley? Based on the old comedy Charley’s Aunt. Loesser was ALSO a very New York guy - New York born and raised - though lately he’d been doing a lot of work out in Hollywood, just like everybody else.

Frank Loesser was such New York guy that Feuer and Martin thought it would be a great idea for Loesser to make his next musical based on the first story from Runyon’s collection Guys and Dolls - a yarn about a guy named Sky Masterson wooing - on a bet - a dame from the Salvation Army. It was called “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown.” As Loesser recalled

FRANK LOESSER: "He said the magic word, `Runyon.' I said, `Let's have a meeting,' and that was it."

That meeting must have gone well, because right away Loesser wrote a dynamite song to open to show, as three Broadway gamblers - or tinhorns - perused the printed tip sheets filled with insider horse race track lingo that he had always enjoyed, like ‘can do’ and ‘likes mud’. The composer made it at trio for three voices, a “Fugue for Tinhorns”: 

Well this was obviously a great start, so Feuer and Martin got the stage rights to Runyon’s book, which was owned by Paramount Pictures, and set Loesser up with a writer named Jo Swerling to shape the book.  But after a summer of working together, it turned out that Swerling and Loesser didn’t really get along, and the book was not, well, funny. So the producers bought Swerling out, fired him, essentially - and instead, they hired another Complete New York guy, Abe Burrows. 

Abe Burrows (born Abram Borowitz) had been the chief writer for the popular radio show Duffy’s Tavern, which always started the same way . 

"Hello Duffy's Tavern, where the elite meet to eat, Duffy ain't here. Oh, hello, Duffy . . . "

Loesser and Burrows were already great pals, and in fact they often wrote song parodies together, which they would perform at parties. So they threw out the old script in its entirety (only Swerling’s name contractually remained), and began again. And now the show really began to take off. As Loesser’ daughter Susan put it, in her 1993 book A Most Remarkable Fella: 

“Abe, of course, turned out to be the perfect choice to bring out the show’s Runyonesque quality. These are Broadway underworld characters who speak an unspeakable grammar with careful enunciation, dignity, and pride. They are adult delinquents who live by an ethical code that transcends street loyalties and expresses a universal morality. These tinhorns, these gamblers, these louts are also gallant and noble and loving - hence lovable. Abe, whose Duffy’s Tavern characters were already in a similar league, warmed to the task.” [MUSIC OUT]

Amazingly, both of the two men immediately agreed that the picaresque quality of Runyon’s world reminded them of nothing so much as those of the underworld characters of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera,  which had had its American premiere in Philadelphia in 1933, by the way, before moving to Broadway and quickly dying a week later. But, you know, apparently somebody saw it during that week, and these audiences probably at least included Loesser and Burrows. The two men were interested in the way the songs in Brecht’s show didn’t necessarily advance the plot - now that’s the innovation that Oklahoma and South Pacific and supposedly other shows of the mid and late 40’s were supposedly doing -  but they were interested in the way the songs in Brecht’s shows advanced the character’s personality and overall point of view. So, an interesting Brechtian sidelight to what is otherwise regarded as a light and fun show.

But every Big Broadway Musical needs a lot of other folks to bring it into being. Feuer and Martin were soon able to add the famous Broadway playwright and show doctor George S. Kaufman as the show’s director. On the strength of Kaufman’s enormous reputation alone, the money from additional backers came pouring in. And as word of the project got around, more and more great Broadway names were signed on - the designer Jo Mielziner, the choreographer Micahel Kidd, and the costumer Alvin Colt. They all got along great at creative meetings, according to Kidd and Mielziner, they just happily agreed with each other at the top of their lungs.

In fact, that’s how Loesser conducted auditions for the show, too: LOUD. He believed in BIG Broadway voices - without any amplification. Although that was rare at the time, he wasn’t buying any of it. Typically he would have all auditioners sing the song “Blue Skies” over and over, louder and louder, in higher and higher keys, just to test their range and their lung power. To Loesser’s delight, nobody sang louder or higher than the comedian Stubby Kaye, who was given the part of the tinhorn Nicely Nicely Johnson. Also signed on were the leading man Robert Alda as Sky Masterson, singer Isabel Bingley as Sarah Brown, and Hollywood actress Vivian Blaine as Miss Adelaide. Abe Burroughs specifically crafted the role of Nathan Detroit the gambler for the veteran Broadway comedian Sam Levene, and Pat Rooney, Jr. - a famous old vaudeville hoofer - was brought in to do the Salvation Army bass drum player Arvide Anderson. B.S. Pulley, a foghorn voiced nightclub comedian who had never done a musical before, was discovered to be perfect for the part of the Chicago mobster Big Jule.

All of these people - ALL of them - were from the New York/Newark/Bronx/Brooklyn part of the world. The production even had a New York Broadway house, the Forty-Sixty Street Theatre, all picked out and rented, and the early rehearsals for the show were all being held there in September, in New York.  Burrows and Kaufman were already talking up the show on a TV show they were both regulars on, called This is Show Business. And the New York mail-order ticket sales were already beginning to pour in!

So, naturally, when it was time to start tryout previews, the first thing they did was head to Philadelphia.

It’s just that, by that point, Philly was regarded as the perfect place to have a tryout run. As Burroughs later explained in his memoir “Honest, Abe”:

“Philadelphia has always been a good tryout town. It was originally chosen because it had a bright, cosmopolitan audience, and it was far enough from New York so that it discouraged the Broadway crowd from coming down to enjoy your troubles.”

Now we can parse that statement a little bit - because as we know by now, Philly hadn’t always been a good tryout town, but the Shuberts’ complete control of the local theater market there meant that they could get it into any house there they wanted  - in this case, the one named after their long-departed brother Sam, on Broad Street. Second, by “cosmopolitan” - well, he meant sophisticated and intelligent and urbane, sure - but I think we can also interpolate the fact that Philly, like New York, had a large Jewish population that loved to go to the theater. If the Philly audience would like it and support a show or a play - especially one that had a mostly Jewish creative team and a lot of well-known Jewish actors in the cast, then it’s likely that the Broadway audience would too. And they would really get lyrics like this:

The other thing we can note is that this was the early days of television - and although on this podcast we’ve previously cited the fact that television was a challenge to the theater in terms of drawing away its audience., in the late 40s- early 50s, when there were just two major networks and just a handful of TV stations on the air - everybody was watching the same TV shows, all over the country. Television, in those days, was a cultural unifier. If folks had been unfamiliar with Pat Rooney before - well surely they had seen him show up on Milton Berle’s wildly popular show. [BRING UP MUSIC] They knew who Kaufman and Burrows and Loesser were because they had just seen them on TV. As Burrows said:

“When I first arrived in Philadelphia with Guys and Dolls, I felt uneasy, I was about to spend four weeks working in a strange town. At least it was strange to me. To a born New Yorker, every other city is ‘out of town.’ . . . But the Philadelphians soon made me feel at home. It turned out that Kaufman and I were celebrities there. The reason was our television show . .  When [we] first walked down Broad Street together, we created a mini-sensation. The people we passed stared at us and many of them stopped and greeted us.” George S. Kaufman who was more than a little high-strung and grumpy, didn’t like being recognized - and he especially didn’t like it when a Philadelphia woman came up and playfully ruffled his hair as he sat in having dinner at Lou Tendler’s Restaurant at the corner of Broad and Locust Street. Burrows attempted to assuage him “George, you were the one who chose to go on TV. These are your fans. They adore you. Why don’t you just relax and enjoy it? He answered me with a contemptuous grunt and walked away.”

But soon it wasn’t just Kaufman who was grumpy. Because rehearsals for Guys and Dolls in Philadelphia, which started at the Shubert Theatre in October of 1950, were going terribly. We noted in Episode 74 that the tryout run of Kiss Me Kate had gone really smoothly at that same theater, just two years previously - almost no changes were even made in the show. But Guys and Dolls was a completely different type of experience. All of Burrows’ jokes that had worked like a dream in New York were falling flat, he felt. Even though some of the songs for the show, like “Bushel and a Peck,” were already recorded by big bands, and were being played on the radio, Frank Loesser was nervous. Many of the cast were terrified of the irascible and brusque Kaufman. Pat Rooney Jr. was hurt when a waltz clog dance - basically his old vaudeville routine - was cut because it didn’t fit the rest of the show. And the whole cast was nervous during tech and dress runs, and many of them complained. The whole thing became sort of a hostile fashion show, Burrows remembered. One of the Hot Box Girls, embarrassed by her scanty costume as she walked to the front of the stage and declared “I can’t go on stage like this, I Iook almost naked.” The producers yelled back at her from the house “That’s the whole idea!”

Now if you thought that little anecdote was sexist and alarming, wait till you hear this story: 

During the first few preview shows, the bantam-sized Frank Loesser became convinced that the tall and elegant Isabel Bingley just could not sing his song “If I Were a Bell” properly. She was supposed to sing it during the scene in Havana, when Sky gives her a really strong Caribbean drink. But Loesser was not pleased with her delivery. The composer, nervous and impulsive, was usually quick to discard any material that wasn’t working. But he wanted to keep this song in the show. His frustration turned on the actress instead.

Writes Susan Loesser: “My father had been telling her - in detail - how he wanted it sung. She couldn’t get it right. Over and over she couldn’t get it right. My father jumped up on a riser to put him at her eye level, and slapped her in the face.”

“Everything stopped. Everyone, including my father, was horrified. Isabel went home. Some people remember that my father sent her flowers with a contrite note. Others remember a diamond bracelet. In either case, she returned.”

But nonetheless, Loesser had taken the song away from Sarah - but to keep it in the show gave it to Vivian Blaine to sing in front of the curtain during a scene change, even though it did not fit her character Miss Adelaide at all. At this point Loesser’s wife Lynn Garland stepped in and confronted the composer.

“What the hell is Miss Adelaide doing singing “Bell” in that silly position?” she demanded to know. “Who in the name of God is she singing to - and why is she singing it at all?”

“Isabel can’t sing it,” replied Loesser.

“ Who says she can’t?”

“I say she can’t” 

“I say she can. You can teach her!” But Loesser had to admit that the actress had stopped speaking to him. 

but let’s let Miss Bingley tell the story herself. Amazingly, she was still around in November of the year 2000, when National Public Radio’s show “Weekend Edition” with Scott Simon interviewed her.  As she remembered, it was not Loesser who sent flowers, but she was not at all bitter:

ISABEL BINGLEY: "We were doing a song and Frank didn't want me to sing it. And it had a very different range, and I said, `Well, why did you hire a singer if you don't want me to sing it?' And he said, `I want you to speak it.' And he started hollering, and I got very nervous and I giggled. And he hauled off and slapped me. And I think he was as stunned as I was. And I just continued on with the song like it had never happened. From that moment on, everyone was my pal because they thought it was so terrible. And his wife at the time, Lynne, did send me a dozen red roses. But Frank never apologized. You know, we all understood. There was tension; we were going to open in a couple of days and everybody was under tremendous pressure. We were working almost 24 hours a day."

The song was at least given back to Bigley, though . . . .

ISABEL BINGLEY: "One night about 1:00 in the morning, Frank called me and said, `Get dressed, get down to my suite.' And I met with him and Cy Feuer. And he said, `We're going to try the song. Do it in front of the curtain, and you have to pretend you're drunk.' And we worked on it till about 5:00 in the morning. And they said, `OK, we're going to put it in on the matinee.' And I looked at them like they were crazy. And they said, `Well, we'll know if it's going to work. And if it works, then we'll work on it.' And, `Go home, get a couple hours of rest, and we'll see you at the theater.' . . .  We put it in the matinee, got a standing ovation and we never changed a thing."

The Philly opening of the show, its World Premier, essentially, had been pushed back to Saturday night, October 14th. Everyone was on edge, because the dress rehearsals had been pretty rocky. But they needn’t have worried.

 Philly critics loved it. The Evening Bulletin raved that it  was “ a bright, fresh, adult,  . . .  musical that kept an audience that packed the Shubert to the rafters laughing for nearly three hours at its opening, and sent them away happy.” And in the Inquirer, Henry T. Murdock praised everybody - all the leads and the minor roles from Pat Rooney to Stubby Kaye to B.S. Pulley. “You can hear what everybody is saying and singing and everybody knows what to do,” wrote Murdoch. “It looks like a sure Broadway smash, and you shouldn’t miss it for the two weeks it is here,” he concluded. 

But soon, the first two weeks of the tryout run were over, however, and still Kaufman, Kidd, Loesser, Burrows, Feuer, and Martin knew . . somehow . . .  the show wasn’t ready for Broadway yet. At three hours, it was too long. The producers weren’t sure what to do - usually they’d call in George Kauffman the famous show doctor to come on down to Philly, watch a run and then tell them what to cut. But Kauffman was already the director of the show! And there was nobody he was going to allow to Show Doctor him! At one point when Loesser suggested reprising some of the best numbers from the first act in the second act, Kaufman yelled back at him: “Sure, if you allow me to reprise some of the best jokes from the first act in the second act!”

Despite all the glowing reviews from the Philadelphia newspaper critics, Burrows was convinced that the first act was too slow, and that heavy cust needed to be made in all the actors' lines. Over Kauffman’s objections, and with much grumbling from the cast, he cut them - but those cuts turned out to be disastrous to the flow of the play. Shamefacedly, Burrows went back to the cast and told them to put all the cuts back in. Sam Levene was the most furious “Abe, it’s very important for this show that I should be happy, and I’m miserable!”

Clearly, everyone realized Guys and Dolls needed at least another three or four weeks out of town before it could go to New York.

But another show, Cole Porter’s Out of this World, was due to move into the Shubert for its own tryout run. The solution they hit upon was to stay in Philly. Move the whole production of Guys And Dolls - sets, costumes, orchestra, cast - over to another theater - the Erlanger up on Market Street. Amazingly, due to the hard work of stage management and a heroic effort on the part of Philadelphia stagehands, this was accomplished in one day, and the show just kept on running to full houses, every night.

Because here’s the thing: Philly audiences saved that show. They never stopped supporting it. Rather than get annoyed that they were seeing a show in some disarray, with need for further development, as they might have done thirty years earlier . . .  they were actively cheering for the show, rooting for it! People came back again and again, just to see what changes and improvements had been made in it. 

And there were in fact a lot of changes still to do. For example, the title number “Guys and Dolls” was still being done a chorus battle between men and women, which didn’t work - the solution was to redo it in a rather Brechtian manner, a la Threepenny Opera, with two of the gamblers narrating the story of the song song to the audience. Robert Alda and Sam Levene had a duet song and dance number together called “Travellin’ Light” that didn’t work - mainly because Levene couldn’t sing and Alda couldn’t really dance. Eventually it was cut, but there were still a lot of other kinks to be worked out. In fact, if two years earlier the producers of Kiss Me Kate could proudly say that the show hardly changed at all over the course of its Philly tryout, and that audiences there saw essentially the show that ended up on Broadway, that was completely different for Guys and Dolls. As Robert Alda later recalled, in an interview:

"Forty of the 41 shows were completely different. In other words, we continuously were making changes. You'd think we had the world's worst flop on our hands."

In the first act, for example, there was originally a song called “Action” about gamblers looking for a crap game. It didn’t work. “One day,” writes Burrows, “Frank and I were sitting in his hotel room worrying together about this problem and I said: ‘you know,  in the dialogue I have Sam introducing himself as Nathan Detroit, sole owner and proprietor of the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.’ . . We looked at each other, we both had the same thought. The line scanned. I quickly cut it out of the script and Frank set it to a tune; It turned out to be one of the best songs in the show.” And the Philly audiences were there to hear it for the first time.

The show stayed an extra week at the Erlanger while it continued to make changes, meaning it was on Market Street for three weeks - and making the Philly tryout run five weeks long in total. That last week in Philly saw one other major addition to the show,  a number that needed to be set in the Hot Box Club, the Broadway nightclub that Miss Adelaide worked at. Here’s Abe Burrows again, from his memoirs:

“Frank Loesser had one more big chore to do. We still needed a new song to open the second act. Frank dug up a song he used to sing at parties called ‘Take Back Your Mink.’ . . .

 . . .  It was perfect for this spot but we only had a week to get it on. That was a ridiculous short time to put on a musical number. It required singing and dancing by the girls (we called them our ‘Dollies’). Michael KIdd had to choreograph the whole number, Alvin Colt had to whip up the costumes. The song had to be orchestrated and then rehearsed by the orchestra. But we finally got it on. Just under the wire. It was performed on our very last night in Philadelphia.”

And, again, according to Burrows, it knocked the Philly crowd for a loop. They loved the number! And everybody went to New York feeling very happy.[MUSIC OUT] The show opened at the 46th Street Theatre on November 24, 1950  to ecstatic reviews. It ran for 1200 performances, won five Tony Awards, was made into a movie, had loads of revivals all of them smash successes, and will no doubt keep on being revived for decades into the future. Everyone loves it. A literal classic. 

And, even though nothing in the show, and nobody involved in creating it had anything to do with Philadelphia, I think we can give the enthusiastic response it got, without fail, throughout its rocky tryout run. Let’s turn one more time to Burrows’ memoir, where he is quite clear that he felt the show might have just failed entirely, despite all its strengths, quote:

“Guys and Dolls was tough to do but it had one great blessing: our tryout run had no financial problems. Many shows run into big money troubles out of town. Empty seats and big losses prevent producers from taking the time to do what is necessary to fix a show. Many of them have to cut their out-of-town tryouts short and take the show into New York before it is ready. A desperate gamble hoping for a miracle. [But] Guys and Dolls happily did big business during the entire run in Philly.”

So, as folks in Philadelphia might rightfully say: “You’re Welcome, New York.” 

And that’s our show for today!  If you’ve been enjoying this season of the podcast, or have any thoughts or suggestions or compliments, drop us an email at AITHpodcast@gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you! I would love to hear from you. To support this show and to get access to bonus material and special insider information about Philly theater history, go to our Patreon page: Patreon dot com/AITHpodcast.  You can also leave reviews about the show on Apple Podcasts, you can follow us on Facebook and on Instagram and on Mastodon, where we post new material about Philadelphia theater history every single day.

This is Peter Schmitz, and the sound editing and engineering for this episode were all done by My Humble Self, right here at our studios in our World Headquarters high atop the Tower of Theater History. 

Thank you for listening to the show, and thank you for coming along on another Adventure in Theatre History, Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]