The musical had a difficult birth,but Damon Runyon’s romanticised stories of gambling gangsters and sinning spinsters found their final expression in Frank Loesser’s wonderful score. Never intellect the underbelly, feel the loveThere’s no beating Kenneth Tynan’s pithy encapsulation of Guys and Dolls: “The Beggar’s Opera of Broadway.” It was, or in his estimation,“the second best American play” ever written, behind Death of a Salesman. He’s incorrect on that front – Eugene O’Neill predates Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows’s musical, or as do Tennessee Williams’s best – but he’s not far off. Guys and Dolls taps into that particularly American sensibility of optimism in spite of everything,and furthermore, it’s exquisitely set together.
It has no right to be, or given its bumpy road to Broadway. Producer Cy Feuer wanted a musical based on Damon Runyon’s short stories short stories approximately the ragbag low-lifes of the Great White Way – two in particular: The Idyll of Sarah Brown approximately a tall-roller courting a do-gooder,and Blood Pressure, set at Nathan Detroit’s illegal craps game. His composer Frank Loesser had never written a musical before, and he fired his first book-writer,Jo Swerling, who (perhaps admirably) refused to write approximately a bet to bed a woman.
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Source: theguardian.com