Loesser: Guys and Dolls (Original Broadway Cast) (Rec 1950) / Where's Charley? (Excerpts)

Sometimes in the world of musical theatre, all the right people come together in the right place at the right time.

When you do, you get Guys and Dolls. Although it lacks the historical importance of Oklahoma!, the cultural cachet of Porgy and Bess or the sheer panache of My Fair Lady, many critics and commentators - when pressed - wind up citing Guys and Dolls as their favourite musical.

It's not hard to understand why. It's one of those rare works of art where form and function as well as style and substance are joined together with a deceptive ease that makes for delightful listening.

Every time you breeze through Frank Loesser's terrific score, the first thought that comes to your mind is how good it is.The tunes bounce, the lyrics snap, the performances have just the right edge.

Just like the rye and ginger ale highballs that were such popular drinks when the show came out, it goes down nice and smooth, with a pleasing kick following not too far behind.

Only later on, do you become aware of just how smartly each song fits each character and their situation, with a minimum of apparent strain.

In gambling parlance, it's a natural.

It all began with Damon Runyon (1884- 1946), the hard-edged, soft-centered journalist who filled his writing with characters who bore names like Dave the Dude and Harry the Horse.

He only wrote in the present tense ("I am walking down Broadway last night and who do I see?") and he loved to twist a phrase ("The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.")

Over the years, sixteen of his short stories would be turned into movies, and by the late 1940s, a collection of his work, called Guys and Dolls, struck sophomore Broadway producers Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin as perfect material for a musical. (For some insights into their first show, Where's Charley?, see below.)

The major source of their inspiration was a story called "The Idyll Of Miss Sarah Brown", about a Salvation Army "doll"who worked among the lowlifes in Times Square.

Runyon had based his character on the reallife Captain Rheba Crawford, known as "the angel of Broadway", who had led a series of successful all-night prayer meetings in the Broadway area in 1922.

As soon as Feuer and Martin secured the rights, they offered the score to Frank Loesser (1910-1969) with whom they had worked on Where's Charley?

The fast-talking, New York-born Loesser was almost a Runyon character himself, a guy who liked to live large. He'd wake up at 3:00 AM and mix himself a double martini before starting to write songs.

He began his career in Hollywood in 1936, where he wrote songs for over sixty films, until being lured to Broadway by Feuer and Martin.

Without knowing anything about the show except that it was based on Runyon's milieu, he immediately wrote the perfect genre piece: Fugue For Tinhorns, a three-part round in which a trio of racetrack aficionados try to pick a winning horse. The combination of classical form and conversational slang ("I got the horse right here …") captured the essence of how Runyon could be sung.

Hollywood screenwriter Jo Swerling tried an early draft of the script for the show, but was found to lack the combination of flexibility and flair that Feuer and Martin found essential. So they then turned to Abe Burrows, riding high as the head writer on the wildly successful radio comedy series Duffy's Tavern. He grasped the Runyon style as quickly as Loesser had and before long, a promising show was being assembled.

Veteran playwright and director George S. Kaufman was once one of the hottest names in the theatre, with shows like You Can't Take It With You and The Man Who Came To Dinner to his credit, but when Feuer and Martin approached him to stage Guys and Dolls, he was in a desolate seven-year stretch of uninterrupted flops.

Fortunately, he too rose to the occasion, badgering Burrows to keep polishing the book and squabbling with Loesser about the number of reprises the composer wanted in Act II. "I'll let you play the same songs if you let me tell the same jokes," is how he settled that argument.

The show was cast with actors, rather than singers, although listening to this recording, most acquit themselves admirably. Robert Alda's Sky Masterson has the right world-weary rasp and no one has ever made an impacted sinus sound as adorable as Vivian Blaine's chronically catarrhal Miss Adelaide.

Borscht belt performer Stubby Kaye was a welcome addition to the musical comedy stage and his rendition of Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat has never been bettered.

Isabel Bigley was hand-picked by Loesser to be his shining soprano lead, but the hottempered songsmith grew so outraged with her "break" near the end of I'll Know that he supposedly slapped her during an orchestra rehearsal, only to return ten minutes later with a diamond necklace.

Sam Levene's Nathan Detroit sings hardly at all, which - to be honest - is a good thing. His character originally had four songs, but they were gradually whittled away due to the actor's vocal ineptitude, with the last one "Travelin' Light", being cut only a few hours before the New York opening night, 24 November 1950.

The show was an enormous hit, ran 1200 performances,was turned into a film starring Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando and is constantly being revived on Broadway, in London and around the world.