直接把Daily Telegraph的review貼上來
McGregor out of luck in classic tale of lowlife on Broadway
Charles Spencer reviews Guys and Dolls at the Piccadilly Theatre
For many of us Guys and Dolls is the One, the greatest of all the great
Broadway musicals.
Yes, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma, West Side Story, Gypsy and Sweeney Todd all have
an undeniable claim on posterity, but to these eyes, these ears, none can
quite match the wit, the pathos, or the sheer spirit-lifting exuberance of
Frank Loesser's wonderful musical fable of Broadway
I first encountered Guys and Dolls at the first night of Richard Eyre's
celebrated production at the National Theatre in 1982. I was suffering from a
clinical depression at the time, but for a few glorious hours the show seemed
like a great, gaudy neon-lit beacon of hope.
Eyre's Guys and Dolls has entered theatrical legend, so director Michael
Grandage was risking a great deal by coming up with a brand new production for
his Donmar Warehouse company in the West End. Could he dispel our possibly
rose-tinted memories of past glories and better a staging viewed by many
as definitive?
Well, I hate to come over all curmudgeonly but the short answer is that he
couldn't. There is much to enjoy, passages when the show undoubtedly achieves
lift-off, but it never quite achieves that sense of pure and continuous
pleasure that Eyre conjured at the National.
Indeed, unusually for Grandage, the production sometimes smells more of
perspiration than inspiration. There are sections when nothing much seems to be
happening, and the staging too often fails to capture the drop-dead humour,
charged energy and personalities of the Damon Runyon short stories of Broadway
lowlife that inspired Abe Burrows's script.
Christopher Oram's Times Square setting lacks the required fizzing voltage,
while Rob Ashford's choreography, though it has its moments, never quite
transports the audience to dance heaven.
The show's biggest failure though is its biggest star. Ewan McGregor's
Sky Masterson, the suave professional gambler who becomes emotionally entangled
with the Salvationist missionary Sarah Brown, proves the hole at the show's
heart. Sky needs to be charming with just a hint of danger about him, but
McGregor's performance is as eerily blank and sexless as his Obi Wan Kenobi
in Star Wars. His tight, strained voice never really lets rip on Loesser's
soaring numbers like My Time of Day and Luck Be A Lady, and there is almost
no crackle of sexual tension in his dealings with Jenna Russell's touchingly
vulnerable Sarah. She's a delight, but finds herself lumbered with a
Jedi knight devoid of charisma.
（哼哼哼哼哼）
Happily there is better news elsewhere. Douglas Hodge again reminds us what a
great comic actor he is as Nathan Detroit, organiser of The Oldest Established
Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York. His crumpled, lived-in face is
superbly eloquent of dismay and bewilderment.
And his relationship with Jane Krakowski's Miss Adelaide, seen here as a
burlesque girl who wears very little indeed beneath her white mink stole, is
the show's chief pleasure. Their 14-year-old engagement is beautifully caught
in all its rueful affection, and Miss Krakowski's adenoidal Adelaide's Lament
encapsulates the humour and pathos that makes this show so special. To fail
to be touched at such a moment, one would, as Runyon put it, need to be such
a guy as will never be moved by anything short of an earthquake. But there are
too many occasions in this production when the earth fails to move.
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BTW, Guys and Dolls的宣傳單今天已寄出。
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