The World of the Play
Damon
Runyon wrote well over fifty short stories popularizing his exploits throughout
New York. However, only thirty-two of
these stories are considered his “Guys and Dolls” collection. That does not necessarily mean they were used
for the musical. Instead, the characters
of the musical are the ones who appear in these stories.
Runyon writes of a dark seedy world,
full of colorful characters and colorful situations. You have the pleasantly rotund Nicely-Nicely
Jones, who partakes in an amazing eating contest to find who the best eater is
in the whole United States (“A Piece of Pie”, Runyon 40-54); Harry the Horse,
who falls in love with a teetotaler during the waning days of Prohibition
(“Delegates at Large”, Runyon 27-39); and Big Jule, the supposedly “hottest guy
in the world”, wanted by every policeman from New York to San Francisco (“The
Hottest Guy in the World”, Runyon 208-217).
All
of the characters seem to be acquaintances of the nameless narrator, thought to
be a stand-in for Runyon himself.
Through the narrator, we hear such awkward speech; Runyon wrote
everything very stylized: there were no contractions used, but every character
spoke with a certain elegance and in an educated manner, yet they were still
capable of taking you out back, and fitting you with a pair of cement
shoes. These men were hoodlums, but they
ran the city in a fair and just manner.
The Three Stories
Out
of all of Runyon’s stories, the creative team were able to narrow down the ones
that would be the story for their musical: “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown”,
“Blood Pressure”, and “Pick the Winner”, which actually came from another one
of Runyon’s collections.
“Idyll”
provided the basic storyline: The Sky, the highest betting man in the country,
comes to New York, and sees a mission band playing on the street. They are led by Miss Sarah Brown: “She is
tall, and thin, and has a first-class shape, and her hair is a light brown,
going on blond, and her eyes are one-hundred-percent eyes in every respect”
(Runyon 18). He is soon following the
band around, and helping Sarah garner larger crowds for her services. Everything is going peachy until it is
revealed that he is a gambler, and she abhors the practice. He lets her be, though he is not the same man
he once was. At a crap game one night,
provided by Nathan Detroit, Sky has the idea to bet his fellow gamblers for
their souls; then they would have to attend Sarah’s meetings. However, he gets into a scuffle with Brandy
Bottle Bates; the two of them are playing craps, and Bates dupes Sky into
losing his cash by unsportsmanlike means: Bates has been rolling “loaded” dice
the entire night. This is important to
note as it helps define Sky: he does not care that he has been losing all
night. He would rather be beaten by fair
means, and Bates’s dice simply are not fair.
Just as Sky is preparing to do something awful, Sarah bursts in. Without realizing, she has stopped Sky from
shooting Bates point blank. She claims
to bet Sky for his soul. Upon rolling
the dice, she wins, saving Sky and Bates from certain death and from further
loss of their dough.
The
second story to flavor the script was “Blood Pressure.” In this one, our narrator has come from the
doctor, where he has found out that his “blood pressure is higher than a cat’s
back” (Runyon 154). Unfortunately, he
runs into Rusty Charley, a most unfortunate fellow known for causing trouble
and destruction. Rusty soon grabs him
and drags him off towards Nathan Detroit’s crap game, which is full of far too
much excitement for a man like our narrator: “Now, of course, I do not wish to
go to Nathan Detroit’s crap game; and if I do wish to go there I do not wish to
go with Rusty Charley, because a guy is sometimes judged by the company he
keeps, especially around crap games, and Rusty Charley is apt to be considered
bad company” (Runyon 156). After facing
serious trouble at the game, and being dragged throughout the city for the rest
of the night, the narrator finds his way home and collapses, praying that his
blood pressure will drop.
As
mentioned in the previous two stories, Nathan Detroit’s crap game is a massive
part of the stories and of the script.
However, Nathan is not a large character in the world of Runyon. He only appears in the background of a
handful of stories. When it came time to
write the script, they knew Nathan needed to be there if they wanted to have
the crap game. Therefore, they went to
another one of Runyon’s stories, “Pick the Winner”, and transplanted the tale
of Hot Horse Herbie and Cutie Singleton over to Nathan and Adelaide.
In
“Pick the Winner”, we meet Hot Horse Herbie and his ever-loving fiancée Cutie
Singleton. Herbie is a race fiend, and
is waiting to win big so that he can finally marry Cutie. Sadly, they have been engaged for ten years,
so no one knows when they will ever tie the knot. They spend a good amount of time at the
racetrack in Miami, and Herbie meets a professor. Together, they figure out a system for the
horses so they can make oodles of money.
It ends up working for them considerably well, but they eventually have
a stinker of a day, and Herbie loses the money.
This sorrow is made worse once he receives a letter from Cutie:
“Dear Herbie,’ she says, ‘I do not believe in long
engagements any more, so Professor Woodhead and I are going to Palm Beach to be
married to-night [sic], and are leaving for Princeton, New Jersey, at once,
where I am going to live in a little white house with green shutters and vines
all around and about. Good-by Herbie,’
the note says. ‘Do not eat any bad
fish. Respectfully, Mrs. Professor
Whitehead’” (Bentley 273).
This
story establishes so much in the Nathan/Adelaide relationship. She has suffered for a long time, and he was
never truly respectful of her.
Therefore, Cutie had to “pick the winner” when she found him. The writers just altered the simplest of
things to make the situation work for the musical, and it adds another layer to
Nathan; he has to realize that he cannot take Adelaide for granted. Otherwise, she may just leave him, and then
he will suffer.
