Gamblers, missionaries, nightclub performers and one engagement that has already lasted fourteen years collide in Guys and Dolls. Nathan Detroit needs money to organise New York’s biggest illegal craps game while his long-suffering fiancée Adelaide would quite like him to organise a wedding. Nathan bets gambler Sky Masterson that he cannot persuade missionary Sarah Brown to travel to Havana with him. Sky accepts, Sarah proves rather less predictable than expected, everybody falls in love with precisely the wrong person and eventually even the gamblers discover there are some bets worth losing.
All Saints Elton Theatre Company brought Guys and Dolls to Derby Hall at The Met from Wednesday 12th to Saturday 15th July 2023, directed and choreographed by Andy Milthorpe with Helen Shaw as musical director.
Set in Damon Runyon’s colourful version of New York City, the musical moves from Times Square to a Havana nightclub and down into the city’s sewers.
Matthew Fleming played Nathan Detroit, who has spent years avoiding marriage while Adelaide, played by Anji Barrett-Chalk, has spent those same years waiting for it. Anthony Appleton played Sky Masterson, with Olivia Kershaw as Sarah Brown.
The result is one of musical theatre’s great romantic comedies, filled with gamblers who talk like philosophers, respectable people making questionable decisions and songs that have become standards in their own right.
The score includes favourites such as Luck Be a Lady, Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat and Take Back Your Mink. Tony Rostron, Tom Kershaw and Andrew Davis appeared as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Benny Southstreet and Rusty Charlie.
Our 2023 production continued more than a century of musical theatre at All Saints Elton and took the company back to The Met in Bury for four days of singing, dancing, romance and extremely dubious financial planning.
Because if Nathan Detroit teaches us anything, it is that putting off one wedding for fourteen years is apparently easier than booking a church hall.