I was not born Broadway Fred.  I was, however, born into a family in which the elders liked Broadway shows.  After a brunch at Ratner’s- a now defunct blintz, lox, and whitefish emporium staffed by suffering waiters with Old Country accents-we met the paternal uncles and their families at Duffy Square.  Emissaries from each branch waited on the TKTS line and made a quick decision and purchase. With giddy expectation, we walked past giant posters and street hustlers and fancy marquees and urban blight, found our theater and were shown to our seats.  We weren’t all together, but the cousins could wave at each other from a few rows apart in the balcony.

The overture began and morphed into an urban ballet with grifters, horse players, loose women, and religious zealots.  The show was subtitled “A Musical Fable of Broadway,” and it seemed to capture the essence of a walk through that exciting neighborhood, except everyone was dressed colorfully and moved lithely. I felt elated as I watched, and thought that I might be able to move with the same verve.  I have since learned it’s not that easy.

This was the 1976 revival of the 1950 Frank Loesser musical, Guys and Dolls. This was one of a handful of productions in the 70’s that adapted a show conceived for white actors to an all-black cast. My mother explained to me that Nathan Detroit, the character played by Robert Guillaume (who would soon become Benson on the television show “Soap”) was played in the original production by Sam Levine.  Not only was the actor Jewish, like us, but the character of Nathan Detroit shared the same heritage.  It wasn’t until recently that I was able to better appreciate the profound effects, both positive and negative, of the changes made in this adaptation.

I may have mentioned in a previous column that I have a Broadway accomplice in my wife, Gail.  She ordered up an amazing CD, the Broadway cast album to the 1976 Guys and Dolls, a Motown release. Here was my chance to revisit a cherished theater memory. Now, I am familiar with the score from having listened repeatedly to the 1950 cast album and having appeared in a college production when I was working towards my master’s degree. While I don’t have the music vocabulary to explain this precisely, I can report that the score had been jazzed-up for the 1976 adaptation.  Some of it seems funked-up.  The overture, for example, borrows a few licks from the Isaac Hayes score for Shaft.

There are changes in Frank Loesser’s lyrics, not always for the better. The Yiddishisms in the original had to be changed to avoid discordant notes.  For example, here is a line from “Sue Me,” as sung by Sam Levine in the original cast album:

All right, already.  I’m just a no-goodnik.

All right, already, it’s true.  So nu?

In the 1976 version, probably to avoid the weirdness of Robert Guillaume speaking Yiddish, the lines were changed to these:

All right, already.  I’m just a big zero.

All right, already.  It’s true; so true….

While I lament the reduction of wit in the adaptation, I can at least understand why they did it. I’m not sure why they made some of the other changes, however. In the original version of the beautiful love song “I’ll know,” Sky Masterson teases Sister Sarah with this description of the man he imagines she could love:

You have wished yourself a Scarsdale Galahad;

The breakfast-eating, Brooks Brothers type….

In the ’76 adaptation, the line becomes this:

You have wished yourself a real dumb character.

A square-thinking pencil pushing type.

In addition to the line changes, this song includes a bit of Barry White seductiveness that seems campy today.

Despite these quibbles, my memory of the 1976 adaptation is a positive one.  I can still picture Ken Page in the role of “Nicely-Nicely” Johnson.  Now, the original “Nicely” was Stubby Kaye, an actor who would have been very much at home with my family eating onion rolls at Ratners. If you watch the MGM movie version (1955), you’ll see him reprise his Broadway performance of “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.”As wonderful as Kaye was, though, I think Ken Page has him beat. Page’s “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” began as a made-up tale of a man seeking redemption to placate the local police, but then expanded into a full-out revival meeting. Page’s dancing was remarkably vigorous for a man of his (large) size, and his prayerful belting would certainly be heard in heaven if there were such a place. I could see his sweat from the balcony. This was the first time I saw someone literally “stop the show.”  We made him reprise the song more than once and we applauded past the point of comfort.

“Broadway Fred” appears every Wednesday.

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