Every year at the Hollywood Bowl, they do a "concert" version of a famous Broadway musical. In this case, "concert" means no sets and some rather odd staging so that the actors can cover the vast Bowl stage. I've seen good and bad there but the best I've seen to date was this year's presentation, which was Guys & Dolls. They did it for three nights — Friday, Saturday and Sunday — and some friends and I were there last night for Sunday's.
Brian Stokes Mitchell played Sky Masterson. He was terrific, capturing well the smooth macho imperative of the character. Scott Bakula was Nathan Detroit and he was pretty good in what is generally a thankless task, musically. Sam Levene, who originated the role on Broadway, wasn't much of a singer so his songs kept getting assigned to other characters, and he was left with "Sue Me" and an order to mouth the words but not sing aloud in the group numbers. This has left every Nathan Detroit since wondering why everyone gets to sing in the show but him.
For the movie, they cast the role with that well-known non-singer, Frank Sinatra. To give Ol' Blue Eyes something to warble, they added him to the title song (where, of course, his character is singing absolutely against his established motivation) and composer Frank Loesser wrote him a new, forgettable song called "Adelaide." For the Hollywood Bowl production, they added in the "Adelaide" number and it actually sounded rather nice…better than when Frank did it in the movie.
Okay, so much for the male leads. Adelaide was played by Ellen Greene, who was so wonderful in the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors, and who basically played the same role here. So you got Ellen playing Audrey playing Adelaide…but it worked. Every now and then when Adelaide was talking about how she wanted to settle down in a little house with Nathan, you expected her to start singing "Somewhere That's Green," but basically it was a great characterization, which I guess was to be expected. The real surprise of the night though was Jessica Biels as Miss Sarah. She struggled a mite with the more operatic portions of the score but when she sang in her natural range, she was delightful…and when they took the bows at the end, she got the biggest ovation.
Two close runners-up for that distinction would be Ken Page, who played Nicely-Nicely Johnson, and our pal Jason Graae, who portrayed Benny Southstreet. Page played the same role in the seventies' (all black) revival of the show and he stopped the show then with "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat," a feat he repeated at the Bowl. Stubby Kaye, wherever he is today, may own that song but Ken Page got himself a lease with an option to buy.
A great night. Kudos to director Richard Jay-Alexander and choreographer Donna McKechnie and to everyone involved. I wish you could see it. Heck, I wish I could see it again. When that show's done right, there's not a whole lot that's better.