LIKE Adelaide, the nightclub entertainer who provides the sweet, klutzy emotional center of “Guys and Dolls,” theatergoers are used to thwarted hopes. Adelaide (Lauren Graham) has been engaged to Nathan Detroit (Oliver Platt), a two-bit shyster running a crap game around Times Square, for 14 years.
You’d think she’d have realized he’s just not that into her by now, but Adelaide’s an eternal optimist. And like her, we keep falling for those charming Broadway snake-oil peddlers.
At the Nederlander Theatre, where Des McAnuff’s glitzy revival of the 1950 classic opened last night, they dazzle us with their handsome costumes and their clever projections (by Paul Tazewell and Dustin O’Neill). They serenade us with an 18-piece orchestra firing on all cylinders. We start believing: This time, it’s really going to happen! But whereas Adelaide eventually gets her ring, we’re left at the altar once again, wondering how things went wrong.
This production of Frank Loesser’s masterpiece is a puzzle, all right: How can something so zippy be so tedious? As his megahit “Jersey Boys” showed, McAnuff is great at keeping things moving. He smoothly segues from Nathan and Adelaide’s scenes to the show’s other star-crossed couple, gambler Sky Masterson (Craig Bierko) and Save-a-Soul do-gooder Sarah Brown (Kate Jennings Grant), and makes colorful use of the flashy showgirls and small-time crooks Damon Runyon, on whose stories the book is based, so vividly brought to life.
But McAnuff just can’t ratchet up the energy at crucial times, a problem that’s particularly glaring since “Guys and Dolls” is packed with fantastic songs. Typically, when Mary Testa’s Gen. Cartwright hijacks “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” her rude 10-second eruption slaps the audience awake and into spontaneous applause.
If only the central foursome could deliver this kind of shame less old- school stage craft. Part of the blame must lay with McA nuff – did he give his cast any direction at all? Bierko projects little outside of a steak-eating grin. He’s the best singer of the lot, but he displays little charisma and even less chemistry with Grant, whose Sarah is both too much and not enough. From the very beginning, something hot is clearly smoldering under that ramrod-straight posture; yet when Bacardi helps the missionary loosen her position, Grant feels too restrained.
Platt and Graham have inherited roles famously held by Nathan Lane and Faith Prince in the ’92 hit revival. For his part, Platt seems so afraid to be compared to Lane that he holds back on the funny, leaving a husk of a character. Runyon’s people are often described as larger than life; this Nathan Detroit is smaller.
Graham, best known as the elder Gilmore Girl on TV, breaks from her predecessor’s mold as well, but this time the result is at least . . . interesting. Vulnerable rather than purely comic, she makes us root for the actress and the character – even though she sings tentatively, moves stiffly and delivers oddly stilted line readings.
The performance is all the more endearing for being so baffling; to paraphrase Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins, it’s such a fine line between inept and memorable. Like Nellie McKay’s downright bizarre Polly in the wretched 2006 revival of “Threepenny Opera,” Graham’s Adelaide sure makes an impression. For better or for worse, you’ll remember her, which can’t be said of this snoozy production.
Elisabeth Vincentelli is The Post’s theater critic.