Guys and Dolls

A Musical Fable of Broadway in Two Acts. Based on a Story and Characters of Damon Runyon. Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser. Book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. Orchestrations by George Bassman and Ted Royal. Restored by Larry Moore

Sierra Boggess, Nathaniel Hackmann, Louise Dearman, David Seadon-Young, Damien Humbley, Sir Thomas Allen; Nadim Naaman; Lucca Chadwick-Patel .

‘Guys and Dolls’ Ensemble
Sinfonia of London
John Mills leader
John Wilson
Chandos CHSA 5382(2)
Chandos.net

John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London continue their survey of Broadway's golden age with Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls — and if any show in the catalogue merited this treatment, it is this one. It opened in 1950, ran for 1,200 performances and carried off the Tony for Best Musical, its book drawn from Damon Runyon's short stories of the 1920s and 30s: tales of gangsters, gamblers and Broadway lowlifes, told in a dialect entirely Runyon's own, in which formal, contraction-free English collides with the choicest New York slang.

As with every previous release in the series, Wilson has reinstated the scoring the first-night audience heard, rather than the leaner versions later productions settled for. Here those originals had disappeared entirely, and what we hear is Larry Moore's note-by-note rebuilding of them, exhaustively researched, missing nothing from the pit.

Casting, Wilson maintains, is what separates a good recording of this kind from a great one: singers who can inhabit a role and still leave a mark on disc are not so easily found. "I keep my eyes peeled," he says, "and on every recording you see new additions, but at the core there is a group of artists who I know can turn up on a Monday morning for the recording and deliver the goods." This time the notable arrivals are Damien Humbley as Nicely-Nicely Johnson and, tempted out of retirement for the occasion, Sir Thomas Allen as Arvide Abernathy. Tempted out of retirement he may have been, but there is nothing rusty about the results.

You might expect a studio cast, however starry, to sound like well-drilled tourists in Runyon's Broadway. This one sounds native. Act 1 Scene 8 sweeps you off to the clubs of Havana on sheer rhythmic energy alone, and the performances only build from there. Nathaniel Hackmann brings swagger and warmth in equal measure to Sky Masterson, while Sierra Boggess makes a properly beguiling Sarah Brown, never more so than in If I Were a Bell. Humbley's Nicely-Nicely stops the show, as he presumably does in the theatre, with Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat, and around him the ensemble sings with real swagger and unerring precision. Even Allen, in a smaller role, makes his presence felt.

The booklet matches the performances for care: a genuine interview, in which David Benedict draws Wilson out on the recording's origins, sits alongside notes that are worth reading rather than skimmed — not something one says of every booklet insert.

I went in expecting a pleasant hour with an old friend. I came out convinced this is the finest complete Guys and Dolls we are likely to hear on disc for a very long time — and I say that as someone who has heard rather too many.