Stratford Festival: Guys and Dolls, based on a story and characters by Damon Runyon, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Jo Swelling and Abe Burrows. Directed & choreographed by Donna Feore. With: Dan Chameroy (Sky Masterson); Jennifer Rider-Shaw (Miss Adelaide); Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane (Sarah Brown); Mark Uhre (Nathan Detroit); Gabriel Antonacci (Benny Southstreet); Steve Ross (Nicely-Nicely Johnson). Continues until November 1, 2026; tickets here.
The Play
The opening scene of Stratford Festival’s production of Guys and Dolls, brilliantly directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, sees a photographer capturing glimpses of its vivid world.
Set in 1949 Manhattan, we see the bewildered tourists and their maps, the policemen hunting their shifty prey, sailors, shoe-shines, jumpy boxers and young women holding balloon bouquets.
Amidst this throng, the fable — with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows — zeros in on a pair of noncommittal gamblers always on the verge of making it big, and the loving and ambitious saints virtuously steering them away from a “jungle of sin.”
On the one hand, there’s Nathan Detroit (Mark Uhre), a crapshooter planning a big event who is meant to have quit his illegal activities as a promise to Adelaide (Jennifer Rider-Shaw), a burlesque beauty and his despairingly devoted fiancée of 14 years. On the other: the older, wealthier, luckier Sky Matherson (Dan Chameroy), who, in a $1,000 bet with Nathan, seduces Sarah Brown (Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane), a missionary guided by a hope to convert Broadway all by herself, whose genuine emotional connection and suddenly blossoming love scares him off.
Can the dolls manifest the suburban fantasies in their willful heads? Can the guys retire from their risky endeavours and use their talents — like organizing — for more secure investments?
Cast & Creative
Across its two acts, energetically conducted by music director Franklin Brasz, these caricatures lives and desires intersect to produce hilarious, emotional and electrifying musical sequences owed to its athletic, symbiotic and consummate supporting cast (with assistant choreographer Bethany Kovarik and Stratford regular Devon Micheal Brown offering flashes of awe-struck brilliance), who seamlessly maneuver in and around the Festival Theatre’s tricky thrust stage.
Perfectly aligned with Bonnie Beecher’s crisp, emphatic lighting, set designer Michael Gainfrancesco utilizes pop-out sets from the stage’s central entrance to swiftly shift between Nathan’s newspaper stand, the Hot Box Club, a lively restaurant in Havana and the Save-A-Soul Mission office.
There is never a dull, dead or delayed moment in this tightly woven production.
Dana Osborne’s time-specific costume design, which places the dancers in garish colours and the gamblers in conventionally baggy, pinstripe garb, is most refined when it comes to the central dolls. Sarah wears a shapely, deep red blazer-skirt combo like armour, while Adelaide dazzlingly journeys a spectrum that finds her as a dazzling vixen, a feisty boardwalk cat and puckish bride.
Though the musical is framed by “the guys,” Mark Uhre’s underwhelming performance and Chameroy’s earnest attempts to bear nuance to his underdeveloped role are overshadowed by Sinclair-Brisbane’s delicate shedding of Sarah’s innocence that finds her loosening up, letting worldly pleasures in and, in “If I Were A Bell,” maturing into womanhood before our eyes.
But, it is Rider-Shaw’s sensational performance as Adelaide that steals the show with her comically nasally drawl, inventive physical gestures and the sensual dimensions she bears on the role.
In “Adelaide’s Lament,” for instance, her exaggerated coloration of the phrase “psychosomatic symptoms” fortifies her character’s charm and wit, whereas later, when Sarah asks her why she doesn’t leave Nathan, it is her pure sincerity that shines through. “I still think I hate him,” she says, pausing before successfully landing on an ironic note of a contradiction: “That’s love.”
To watch Rider-Shaw in Guys and Dolls is to watch a star at their prime: she is Adelaide.
Final Thoughts
But, at around 2 hours and 40 minutes, Guys and Dolls, despite the glossy production’s best efforts, loses some of its steam in its second act, since all of the stakes and drama are built up in the first.
What becomes clear along the way is that each of the men possess what the other lacks: Nathan struggles between having the sort of luck that would allow him to become the kind of man that would give the loving Adelaide the life that she wants, whereas Sky tries to use his luck to convince Sarah that his intentions are pure despite the sinful means that they come by.
“It shows how good can come from evil,” Harry the Horse (Henry Firmston) concludes at the mission, which distills the shows aims, whose other baked-in themes, which skewers married life and aspires towards the attainment of a nuclear, middle-class family, will strike a contemporary audience as anti-feminist, deeply gendered and out-of-date. The production is more interested in emphasizing the importance of change, which arises from clarified reasoning and clever rhymes.
Traditional as it may be, there’s a timelessness to the risks Guys and Dolls takes and riotously rewards.
In this well-crafted production, love is a game in which you’ll draw the winning hand.
By Nirris Nagendrarajah for Ludwig-Van.
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