MTP “Guys and Dolls” a Sure Bet for Fun
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
There is a profound reason that “Guys and Dolls” has so long sat near the top of the Broadway canon: it is a musical imbued with the sort of supreme structural confidence that makes everything in it seem inevitable. In their current mounting at the Historic Pelzer Auditorium, the Mill Town Players capture a remarkable measure of that quality. They achieve this not by pretending that the show is simple, but by making its complex machinery feel almost entirely weightless in motion.
What is perhaps most striking about the evening is the production’s unruffled composure. The scene changes move briskly, the story advances with a kind of merciless clarity, and the twenty-three musical numbers are handled less as obligatory interruptions than as the very engine of the evening. One is left with the deeply agreeable sensation—an experience so rare in the theater—that the show has existed somewhere in the atmosphere all along and has merely now been given a visible form.
Damon Runyon’s people—the gamblers, showgirls, horseplayers, small-time operators, and the various other denizens of the Broadway margins—remain the show’s secret, inexhaustible reserve of charm. They are, in the classic Runyon manner, both worldly and innocent, comic and without much intentional sense of humor. They are forever haggling their way through a private, hermetic economy built on schemes, wagers, and compromised dignity.
Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows’s book preserves that concrete, lightly amused humanity, crucially avoiding the temptation to sentimentalize it out of existence. The plot, in brief, turns on Reed Halvorson as Nathan Detroit, who is forever trying to keep a floating crap game afloat without quite finding the time to marry Miss Adelaide (Hannah Morton). Meanwhile, Sky Masterson (Drake King), the polished gambler, accepts a bet that carries him directly into the orbit of Salvation Army Sergeant Sarah Brown (Eliza Burdette) and, to his own genuine surprise, into something resembling love.
Halvorson’s Detroit is a manic creation—think Nathan Lane after a couple of Red Bulls—providing the lovable loser gambler with an energetic and engaging turn from start to finish. Opposite him, King is razor-sharp as Masterson, utilizing a jutting chin and practiced attitude to hide a kindness and a warm heart. It is his particular journey that gives the show that essential Runyon touch, showing that even the hardest of gangsters possess a capacity for love and loyalty.
But it is the women who shine brightest in this production, armed with passionate vocals in the musical numbers and street-smart attitudes that make them more than the equal of the hoods whom they encounter. Morton, as the nightclub singer and long-suffering love for Nathan Detroit, is compassionate and fun, making the most of every song and every line, and nailing the show-within-a-show perfectly. From the song Ella Fitzgerald famously took to the top of the charts in 1950, “A Bushel and a Peck,” to the sniffly brilliance of “Adelaide's Lament” and the cheeky defiance of “Take Back Your Mink,” Morton reliably hits all the right spots.
Meanwhile, Burdette, as the leader of the Salvation Army mission, brings her own sterling vocals to the Mill Town Players once again in this production, following top-tier performances in last year’s “South Pacific” and the holiday songbook of “Cool Yule.” From her duet with King on “I’ll Know” to her soaring solo on “If I were a Bell,” Burdette delivers a period-correct vocal performance evocative of the era’s great big-band singers, making it radiantly clear that love can be found in the most unexpected of places:
“Ask me how do I feel
Little me with my quiet upbringing
Well, sir, all I can say is
If I were a gate I'd be swinging
And if I were a watch I'd start
Popping my spring
Or if I were a bell I'd go
Ding, dong, ding, dong, ding”
She sings of chemistry—a phenomenon that is palpably on display between Sarah and Sky from early in the first act.
The entire cast finds a similar sympatico throughout the evening, whether the stakes are quietly serious or intentionally, downright silly. Aaron Pennington, in the role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson, comes dangerously close to stealing the show entirely. His Lou Costello-like antics are seamless, fluid, and an utter joy to watch, particularly when he is playing off the wide-eyed comic timing of Cameron Woodson’s Bennie Southstreet.
Grounding the broader comedy is Rod McClendon, who brings an appreciative warmth to the Salvation Army’s Arvide Abernathy. As one of the few male characters not played for laughs, he serves as the emotional center to the mission’s cause—a mission currently under fire from the area General, Matilda B. Cartwright, whom Shannon Faulkner delivers with a joyful, booming bluster. The margins of this world are filled out by Brian Reeder’s big-shot Chicago gangster, Big Jule, and his pal Harry the Horse, played by Alex Robinson in a classic Jimmy Cagney style, both adding even more vibrant color to an already colorful staging.
Under the direction of Mill Town Players founder Will Ragland—who boasts a long history with this production—the performers manage to do the truly hard thing: they make their roles feel not merely inhabited, but nearly synonymous with themselves. The company’s energy is at its most potent when it treats these characters as if they were not theatrical inventions at all, but rather the natural products of a raffish little universe that has always been there, just waiting for the right actors to walk into it.
The production’s ensemble work is especially persuasive, which matters in a show whose pleasures depend on motion, social texture and the comic pressure of a crowd. Even when the staging grows busy, it never loses the sense that this bustle is not incidental but essential, the very condition under which “Guys & Dolls” comes properly to life.
Danielle Horn’s choreography gives the show its nervous pulse, especially in the gambling scenes, where movement becomes a kind of urban sport—fast, kinetic, a little shabby and wholly alive. The dances do not merely illustrate the action; they register the temperature of the world in which these characters are trying to survive.
Known for its detail to set construction, the production remains faithful to the counterfeit glamour of Damon Runyon’s Broadway underworld, with joints, street corners and dance-hall shimmer rendered in a way that is faintly tawdry and completely convincing. Mill Town Players has not tried to make “Guys & Dolls” grander than it is; that restraint may be why the show lands with such force.
The seven-month renovation of Historic Pelzer Auditorium adds another layer to the experience, and a welcome one. The hard wooden seats are gone, replaced by padded seating with a vintage feel, along with new carpeting and a sharper audio system that lets the work of the live band come through with uncommon clarity and makes every spoken line crisp.
Taken together, the revived room and the production in it create the pleasant sensation that the evening has arrived at exactly the right time: old work freshly heard, old space newly hospitable, and a musical that still knows how to make a city’s underside seem, if not noble, then undeniably, irrepressibly alive.
Cast: Nathan Detroit, Reed Halvorson; Miss Adelaide, Hannah Morton; Sky Masterson, Drake King; Sarah Brown, Eliza Burdette; Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Aaron Pennington; Benny Southstreet, Cameron Woodson; Harry the Horse, Matthew Merritt; Big Jule, Brian Reeder; Society Max/Drunk, Jay Bearden; Liver Lips Louie/Calvin/Emcee, Jackson Caito; Rusty Charlie/Waiter, Cameron Wilkie; Angie the Ox, Evan Sand; Hot Box Dancer (Gertie), Elizabeth Kinney; Hot Box Dancer (Alice), Angelina Moore; Hot Box Dancer (Drucie), Jillian Moore; Hot Box Dancer (Mimi), Allie Norton; Hot Box Dancer (Helen), Brea Shipley; Hot Box Dancer (Lillian)/Martha, Carol Taylor; Lt. Brannigan, Dan Wilkie; Gen. Matilda B. Cartwright, Shannon Faulkner; Arvide Abernathy, Rod McClendon; Agatha, Morgan Parrish
Will Ragland - Director, Josh Morton - Musical Director, Danielle Horn - Choreographer, John King - Lighting Designer, Jessica Johnson, Betsy Allardice, Kris Yon, Cyndi Lohrmann - costumes, Colin Moroney - Stage Manager, Josef Wehunt - Audio Engineer
“Guys and Dolls” will run Friday-Aug. 9, including Saturday shows. Tickets here.
