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[0:00] Michael Riedel: Michael Riedel here with Singular Sensation, based on my best-selling book that pulls the curtain up on all the juicy gossip of Broadway in the 1990s. Now, the interviews you will hear on this series are my personal recordings I made when I was reporting and writing the book, Singular Sensation. They've never been heard by anyone but myself until now.

[0:27] Michael Riedel: These recordings were made at crowded New York cafes and restaurants, in theater offices, on the phone, and so they have varying levels of quality, but our great editor has digitally restored them to enhance clarity. You will still hear the occasional clinking of glasses— a few were raised during some of these interviews, I can tell you that— fuzziness of a phone call and voices, and you will hear ambient sounds, but it should give you a sense of what it was like when I was recording these interviews at places like Sardi's and Joe Allen. Gives you a little flavor of what Broadway is like. I hope you enjoy Singular Sensation.

[1:27] Michael Riedel: So New York in the early 90s was a tough town. You had the crack epidemic raging. David Dinkins was mayor. Rudy Giuliani was coming up through the ranks trying to challenge David Dinkins. It was a tough time. Crime in Times Square was out of control. And in the midst of this horror of New York came Frank Loesser's great musical Guys and Dolls, which was a fable of New York City. Guys and Dolls really is the creation of Damon Runyon, who was one of the great short story writers of American literature. Now, Damon Runyon, he was a newspaper guy and he made his beat Times Square, and he got to know all the gamblers, all the colorful people, and he turned them into these great characters in his short stories.

[2:15] Michael Riedel: Two of his stories, The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown and Blood Pressure, became the basis for Frank Loesser's great musical Guys and Dolls. The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown was about a woman who was in the Salvation Army trying to save Times Square, which is kind of funny if you think about it, because Times Square in the 1990s was a disaster. And here was Sarah Brown worried about gamblers. They were actually gambling. They weren't crack addicts. They were gambling. So she was trying to save it. And Blood Pressure was about the gamblers who were shooting craps. Damon Runyon captured these wonderful characters and Frank Loesser understood, I think, because he lived in Times Square. He was a Broadway composer. He knew those people too.

[3:03] Michael Riedel: I think he thought that Damon Runyon captured them so well and he thought he could write a musical, Guys and Dolls, the subtitle of which is A Fable of Times Square. A Fable of Times Square. It was a romanticized version of Times Square back then, but little did we know that that romanticized version of Times Square, which seemed so innocent— I mean, you know, Salvation Army, gamblers— would be exactly what New York needed in 1992 when Times Square was now full of violence and crime. And it was Guys and Dolls that in many ways reminded people of how much fun Times Square once was.

[3:42] Michael Riedel: So the Broadway producers Cy Fuhrer and Ernie Martin, they thought Damon Runyon's stories could make a musical. They got the rights in 1946 and they went right to Frank Loesser, one of the great Broadway composers and lyricists of all time. They brought in Joe Swerling to do the book and Abe Burrows, who was a comedy writer on radio back then, to come in and kind of revise Swerling's book. But the masterstroke was they brought in George S. Kaufman, the great writer and director, to direct Guys and Dolls. And you have to understand about these guys. These guys were New York through and through. And this is why they could write Guys and Dolls, because they knew this city backwards and forwards.

[4:22] Michael Riedel: And they knew that Guys and Dolls was going to be, in a strange way, a love letter to New York City told through back then the underbelly of New York. Now, Guys and Dolls opened on November 24th, 1950, to reviews that I'm telling you people would kill for today. I want to read you one right now. This is from John Chapman in the Daily News, November 25th, 1950. Here is New York's own musical comedy, as bright as a dime in a subway grating, as smart as a sidewalk pigeon, as professional as Joe DiMaggio, as enchanting as the skyline, as new as the paper you're holding.

[5:04] Michael Riedel: Which, by the way, you want to talk about critics, nobody writes like that. There's no critic who can describe a musical like that. What Chapman understood was what he saw with Guys and Dolls. It was fresh. It was exciting. It was vibrant. It was new. It was New York City in 1950. So, Guys and Dolls became a huge hit, just a big, big hit. And, I mean, if you think about that score, I got the horse right here, his name is Paul Revere, da-da-da-dee-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Can do, can do, who says the horse can do? I think that's the fugue for tin horns. And then you've got the wonderful ballad, and I think, I've never been in love before. At once I knew the score. Every single song in Guys and Dolls is a work of genius, and that is Frank Loesser.

[6:03] Michael Riedel: But, funnily enough, the show, as big a hit as it was back then, it kind of fell by the wayside, and it was not revived. There was an all-black revival in the 1970s, and I think it was done in high schools and colleges. But, for some reason, this really masterpiece of American musical comedy was forgotten about, overlooked, until Michael David, a producer on Broadway, a young producer starting out on Broadway in the early 90s, thought and went back and looked at the show and said, you know what? This is exactly what New York, which is now struggling, which is in trouble, needs. It needs a show that celebrates how much fun New York can be.

[6:45] Michael Riedel: Michael David was a producer who came out of a non-profit world, a really kind of a ragtag band of people that he put together to create Dodger Productions, and they really had not done a big Broadway show before Guys and Dolls. And this was a monumental show that they were putting together. And they were terrified. They were scared, because they thought, are we really up to the task of putting on a great revival of the greatest musical comedy of all time?

[7:14] Michael Riedel: I had seen Guys and Dolls only once when I was a teenager in Traverse City, Michigan, on summer vacation at an amateur playhouse. And for whatever reason, Frank Loesser is a reason. You remember some of that stuff. So anyway, we started to tell you all what to do, and it became clear in researching this stuff that most revivals, as they were called, were literally the ends or beginnings of tours, usually with a TV star. They went out, someone on the bus company, and that was it. That was what Fran and Barry were doing. Absolutely.

[8:03] Michael Riedel: I was like, Has-Been star, Robert Goulet in South Pacific. No, but that was it. And so for us, who had just wholeheartedly spent big money on new ones, and had not a dense track record, the approach to Joe Loesser and to Harold Ornstein, who was the army buddy and basically lawyer for Frank Loesser for years, was about treating it like a new show with people we knew, younger people than who had done it before, and with what turned out to be the biggest budget anybody spent on a revival, which we like to call classing.

[8:45] Michael Riedel: So as the producers were pulling together the revival of Guys and Dolls, they were going to the budget, and it was ballooning, and they were getting scared. So back in those days, a revival of a Broadway show in 1991, 92 may have been about $1.7 million, $2 million. They were looking at a revival of Guys and Dolls, an old show from 1950, with a price tag of $5 million. So when Michael David got the rights, after a protracted discussion with Joe Loesser, Frank Loesser's widow, to get the rights to Guys and Dolls, everybody on Broadway, and back then, you have to remember in the early 90s now, you have a lot of people who were on Broadway, who had worked on Broadway, who had seen the original production of Guys and Dolls, and they loved it, and they remembered it.

[9:37] Michael Riedel: And I think they were thrilled that a young producer like Michael got the rights to do a revival of Guys and Dolls. And they kept going up to him, and they said, oh, I'm so excited for you. You've got the rights to Guys and Dolls. I saw that show. I saw the original production. It was wonderful. Everybody kept coming up to Michael saying, it's a great show. You've rediscovered it. This is going to be fabulous. And Michael, as a young producer, said, you know what they're really saying to me? Don't f*** it up.

[10:05] Michael Riedel: We'll be right back with more on Guys and Dolls.

[10:08] Michael Riedel: And we're back with Singular Sensation and the story of Guys and Dolls.

[10:12] Michael David: They employed some of the great, great artists working on Broadway then. William Ivey Long, the costume designer, Tony Walton, the set designer. William Ivey Long's costume budget came in at $700,000. Tony Walton's sets came in at $875,000. And by the time they tallied everything up, this Guys and Dolls was going to be $5.5 million, making it the most expensive revival in Broadway history.

[10:38] Michael David: We began to put this thing together. We basically went to folks we knew, with one exception really. We used William and we used Paul Gallo. Then the idea was to go to Tony Walton, who was older, and he became in his own way sort of the rock in terms of figuring out tone and look and stuff with Jerry and sort of how it was going to feel and creating a set that was very expensive.

[11:05] Michael David: What was your initial idea for the budget for the show? Do you remember what you talked about? The budgets were going up. We did Big River for $2.5 million and we found out it was zero-based budget. That was all we could raise, so that's what we produced it for. We had spent money on Secret Garden, obviously, and Into the Woods, and the original whatever. I think we hoped it would be less than $5,000, and it was $5,000. We thought it would be less. But the idea was that these can't be terrible. I don't think he said paper mill, but it was like the paper mill costumes. He was salivating to this thing, but he hadn't won $18 million. He still was William, so he didn't hesitate to say he needed a big budget.

But anyway, that was the gig. The idea was to resurrect a classic from scratch and not rent scenery from here and costumes from there and people who needed work in it. It was as much organic as it was conceptual. We went to the people we knew, people we worked with, and that was it. I think that in the end determined who was going to be cast.

[12:39] Michael David: Where were Nathan and Faith in your estimation at that point? Did you know? It was early. Faith is special. Do you remember being in auditions and the impression that they made on you? Yeah. Again, it's interesting. It's not like I'd seen five performances of any of this stuff before, but yeah, they're knockouts relative to other people we'd seen auditioning for musicals. This was a different kind of musical than we'd ever done. We'd gotten at that time the Martin Beck, which was not a most desirable theater back in those days. No, it was on the other side of 8th Avenue. No one wanted the Beck. Think about it today. We had the Beck. They had moved to Bedmast. It was a great place to watch something.

Put it up, and I remember Roger Berlin came in early. I remember Roger Berlin came. He really came to our little office. We were in 1501 at that time. I think it was a little more than the three of us around a bed desk with two phones in the window, but the point is it was almost like that. He came and he sat down, and he took out a checkbook like you had to write for your groceries and wrote a check for $1 million.

[14:07] Michael David: Had he seen a preview of it? No, no, no. He was one of, if not the first person, so into it. It was unbelievably validating for this foolhardy idea. Everyone tells me that the early previews were not. No. What was going on? What did you see? What was the problem? It was a wing and drop set. It was the old days. I mean, there's a vacation of the old days. I mean, I loved what Tony did, but that was it, and I think Jerry hates tech, so the stage manager usually does tech, and Jerry smokes a cigar under the marquee. That's the gig, and he did the same thing for the forum, too. So I don't know. I mean, I just think it needed to find the rhythm, and it happened, and it was populated with people who I suppose growing up had done classics, but basically it was alien in some ways to a lot of people.

[15:05] Michael David: How was the audience reacting to those early previews? Slowly. I mean, there was a lot of anticipation and pressure. We were scallywags at that time, and so I don't think there was a lot of necessary cheerleading for it to go on in terms of that unhealthiness that exists sort of in our world, but no, it was frightening. It was not good, and we've had a couple of shows in the back, well, Into the Woods was back first, so I remember I sit on the stairs going upstairs on Theater Right and sort of look through the rail and nothing was happening. People would leave. I mean, it was not good.

[15:43] Michael David: As good as a Broadway show can be, it always needs a great press agent to really sell it to the media and sell it to the audiences. Adrian Bryan-Brown, now a legend as a press agent, one of the best, but Adrian was just beginning his career. He'd left a firm where he was working as a junior press agent, and he opened his own shop, and Guys and Dolls was one of his first shows, and as a press agent, when you have a show that is in trouble in previews as Guys and Dolls was, you've got to find a way to contain all of the leaking that's going to go on to the press and then turn it around and spin it as a show that is going to be a big, big hit, and that's what Adrian did very, very well.

[16:29] Adrian Bryan-Brown: Michael David said, You have to go meet Joe Lesser. That was my first visit. I had to be auditioned, and that was kind of it. I wasn't really a huge fan of the show. I knew it, obviously, but I was always more like Kiss Me, Kate is, to me, the ultimate showbiz all-time musical. So my recollection was very much, yes, I knew the songs and everything, but it wasn't until Michael David said, Yes, we're really going to do it.

[17:06] Adrian Bryan-Brown: What was that meeting like? It was hysterical. I just remember she was doing 20 things at once, and she kept on sort of sitting on the couch, sort of pocketishly, leaning back like this, and then there'd be a phone call. She'd run away. I'll be back. I don't know what she wanted, but it was fine. I was expecting some kind of grilling. What's important about the show? Why do you want to do it? I think, as you will hear from a lot of people, there was a lot of bidding on doing the show from producers. Sy Fuhrer really wanted to do it again. I think he thought he was best friends with Lesser, and he deserved to be able to do it again. Joe's gone on record as saying that the reason he was able to do it with Michael David was he was great in admin meetings, in Tony Abbott meetings. He always agreed with what he said.

[18:04] Adrian Bryan-Brown: Oh, she was on the administration for that? Yes, and that's how she sort of knew him. My recollection was that there was major concern about Jerry because they thought he was going to make it sort of bouncy and silly and fun. I think the whole attitude that we were getting was that you thought, Hey, Tony, and I guess sketches have got out, and it looked too cartoony. It had that Dick Tracy movie.

[18:21] Adrian Bryan-Brown: That's right, and I think because the movie had been so bad in trying to translate that Brunnian land into some kind of cartoony thing, I think there was concern that somehow this was going to be not respectful. I think economic times were pretty bad, and suddenly it became a symbol of good old New York. It became almost nostalgic that this was a sign for Broadway and New York that this was going to become some kind of symbol for Renaissance. As a producing model, it kind of blurred the distinction between a classic oldie and a new musical. I think the consumer was confused. They knew it was an old title, but it was so energetic and exciting. It had the event status.

[19:12] Michael David: Right, and it wasn't like a touring show that just popped in.

[19:15] Adrian Bryan-Brown: Right, so it was like, in a big way, saying that there is this potential to really revisit revivals.

[19:46] Michael Riedel: Up next, Jerry Zaks on how he pulled Guys and Dolls out of the fire.

[19:55] Michael Riedel: Thank you for listening to Singular Sensation. I'm your host, Michael Riedel. To find out more about Singular Sensation, the book and the podcast, visit bpn.fm/singularsensation. This episode was edited by Sarah Goodman and produced by Dori Berenstein, Kimberly Garris, Alan Seals, and Sarah Goodman for the Broadway Podcast Network. Special thanks to Liz Armstrong and the entire BPN team.