Guys and Dolls--Set and Costume Design

Luck be a lady tonight

Guys and Dolls, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows was produced in Winter Semester, 2003 in the Snow Drama Theatre at Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Synopsis
The opening of the show is a few moments of choreographed pandemonium where the audience is introduced to the denizens of New York City.  Pickpockets, chorus girls, gamblers, tourists, and street sweepers are all shown doing the things they do in this world.

We are introduced to Nathan Detroit, a gambler and some of his associates and learn that he will not be able to rent the Biltmore Garage for his illegal, floating crap game if he can't come up with a thousand bucks in advance.  This is exacerbated by the fact that some high rollers are in town looking for some action.

Nathan's fiance of fourteen years, Miss Adelaide who is a dancer in a nightclub downtown wants him to end the floating crap game and become a respectable citizen so they can finally be married.  Nathan, of course doesn't want to rush into anything.  He has promised her that he has closed the crap game, but that is a lie.  When he is about to be caught in the fib, he lies and tells her he is planning for their wedding.  This can't end good for him.

Nathan sees Sky Masterson who is described as "the highest roller of them all."  He hatches a plan with his 'associates' to trap Sky with a bet he cannot win for a thousand dollars.  Sky tells him that his old man gave him some advice once.  He said the old man told him that one day a man would come to him and offer to bet him that he could make the jack of spades jump out of the unopened deck of cards and spit cider in his ear.  The old man told Sky not to bet this man because if he did he would end up with an ear full of cider.  Sky offers a counter bet for the same thousand dollars that Nathan cannot tell him the color of the necktie he has on.  No bet.

They talk about women (dolls) and Sky talks about his prowess with them.  Nathan asks him why he hasn't taken up with one.  He taunts Sky and bets him the same thousand dollars that Sky can't take a girl he chooses to Havana with him.  Sky takes the bet and Nathan chooses Sister Sarah from the Save-A-Soul Mission.  Sky clutches his ear and laments, "Cider!"

Sky follows Sarah to the mission and confesses to her that he is a sinner and he needs saving.  She is not stupid.  Sarah knows what kind of man he is and what he is probably after.  They play a little cat and mouse and you aren't always sure who the cat is.  He offers her one dozen bonafide sinners for their prayer meeting if she will only have dinner with him.  She asks where and he says, "Havana."  Sarah declines the invitation, rudely.  Just then, General Cartwright comes in and announces that they are going to close the mission because they haven't had any success for a very long time.  Sarah guarantees General Cartwright one dozen genuine sinners.  General Cartwright shouts, "Hallelujah!"  So does Sky.

Sky takes Sarah to Havana where Sky kinda sorta tricks her into getting very drunk.  The night was going exactly as Sky had wanted it to until he had his conscience pricked.  He was feeling things for Sarah that were foreign to him.  He had apparently never met the right girl.  Feeling guilty he got her on the airplane back to New York.  On the flight she sobers up and they have a very nice moment where he sings "My Time of Day," meaning four o'clock in the morning.  As they approach the mission, a police whistle sounds and gamblers and policemen pour out of the mission and scatter.

Nathan, having not come up with the thousand bucks yet was holding the crap game in the mission.  The mission soldiers appear at that moment and tell Sky that his idea for holding a midnight rally had been much more successful than daylight rallies because, who knew that sinners were out after dark.  Sarah, realizing that she had been set up dismisses Sky.  She believes he set up the crap game in the mission by luring her to Havana and convincing Arvide to hold the rally after dark.  She feels used.  She should.  He originally took her to Havana to satisfy a bet.  What he hadn't counted on was falling in love for her.  She tells him to ignore the marker she held for one dozen sinners and that their relationship is over.  Arvide pulls him aside and tells him that if Sky doesn't pay off on the marker he will tell everyone in town that he is a dirty welcher.

After the mission fiasco, Sky runs into one of Nathan's 'associates'.  Sky is desperate to find the game and the associate tells him it is in the sewer.  Imagine shooting craps in the sewer.  Maybe that is ironic?  Before Sky arrives to the game, Big Jule, a gangster from Chicago has been losing badly.  He is upset and holds everyone at gunpoint until he can win back his money.  He uses blank dice that only he can remember where the numbers used to be.  He cleans out everybody including the house.

Sky shows up and tries to get the gamblers to go to the mission for the prayer meeting.  They laugh at him.  So he decides to bet them one thousand dollars apiece against their souls.  If they win they each get a grand.  If he wins they each have to attend the prayer meeting.  He sings the song, "Luck be a Lady Tonight."  At the end of the song he throws the dice and the lights go out.

The lights come up with all the gamblers walking downtown toward the mission and complaining about not wanting to go to a prayer meeting.  Some of them complain and some of them warn the others that Sky owns the markers for their souls and they wouldn't want the reputation of being welchers.  Apparently that is the worst thing you can call a gambler.  Nathan meets Adelaide who has been stood up for the wedding and she tells him her mother thinks they are already married because she told her so.  She also told him that they have a lot of children.  He says they should get married right now, but then says he can't because he has to go to a prayer meeting.  She is furious and tells him to leave, that it is over.  She tells him it is the biggest lie he ever told.

They make it to the meeting and Sky shows up and announces to the general that there are one dozen assorted sinners.  He then leaves.  They have a meeting where the gamblers are all pretty rude and Nathan makes them behave.  They give testimony one by one, and the testimonies are usually funny.  Harry the Horse confesses that the only reason they showed up was that Sky had won their souls in a dice game.  General Cartwright shouts hallelujah and comments on how good can come of evil.  Nathan gives testimony that he bet a guy $1000 that he couldn't take a certain doll to Havana with him but he didn't feel too bad because he "won the bet."  Sarah doesn't believe him and questions him.  When she realizes what Sky has done, and the sacrifice a gambler had to make to do that, she rushes out of the meeting to find him.

Nicely Nicely gives testimony and sings the song, "Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat," which is one of the anthemic songs of the whole play.  We aren't sure if by the end of the song, Nicely isn't converted.

Sarah and Adelaide meet on the street and they talk.  Adelaide tells Sarah about the big lie Nathan had told her.  Sarah tells her that there were gamblers at the meeting and she thought Nathan was one of them.  Adelaide says, "Well how do you like that, just when he should be lying he's telling the truth."  They agree they are better off without the guys and then realize they aren't fooling anybody.  They hatch a plan and sing the song, "Marry the Man Today."  The message is that if they marry the man today they can change his ways tomorrow.  Devilishly clever of them.  Who are the real sinners here?

When the song ends, the lights go out and the lights come up in New York City where Sky is holding the bass drum from the mission and preaching to the people.  Nathan and the gamblers show up and they talk.  Moments later Adelaide shows up in a wedding veil and we find out that the gamblers aren't there to gamble but rather to attend Nathan and Adelaide's wedding.

The show is fun, funny, full of great moments and lines.  It is very quotable, and most theatre people can quote it liberally.  I quoted and paraphrased it quite a bit in my synopsis.  That is my acknowledgement, so this isn't plagiarism.

Concept
Hyrum Conrad, the director approached me one day while we were talking about doing this play and he said he wanted the world of Guys and Dolls to be like the comics.  I asked him if he meant the Sunday Funnies and he said yes.  I immediately knew where this play was going, because as a young man, the Sunday Funnies were my literature.  Essentially I would be designing the backgrounds and the characters.

A few days later, I suggested to him a way to make the world we were creating even more dynamic.  Many comic artists don't have realistic backgrounds, rather they often disregard straight lines or straight horizons.  I had been involved in a version of Guys and Dolls once before that had all the buildings leaning in so the space above the stage was smaller.  This gave an illusion of height, but I also found it to be just a little oppressive.

I suggested to Hyrum that we imagine a doming pool of magma underneath New York City which meant that the backdrops would kind of appear to be seen through a fisheye lens.  Everything would be designed and painted in a strange perspective.  A perspective with rules, but a weird perspective nevertheless.  Hyrum signed off on the idea and I began to work.

The Scene Design
I am sorry to say that because this play was produced so long ago, I have lost track of my original scenic and costume designs, the actual drawings and renderings of this work.

I already mentioned the doming pool of magma in the previous section.  The idea was to create a kind of bubble along the horizon line which would change the relationship of each building to the next one.  The buildings that were closest to the center would be more vertical and each row of buildings would be angled more and more depending on how far away they were from the center line.

I also decided that we would have hard legs that functioned as portals for the masking.  Each of the hard legs was painted to look like a building and each of them followed the same pattern of the angle.  The furthest downstage were angled the most and the furthest upstage were angled the least.

An idea of the forced perspective of the set

This long view shows the horizon line on the backdrop which is domed.  Notice the hard legs functioning as portals on each side of the stage.

You can also see that we painted the backdrop with a cartoonish aerial perspective, where the buildings in the foreground are painted in focus and the two rows in the mid-ground are less detailed and progressively fuzzier, lighter in value and cooler in temperature.  Each row back was less detailed until the last row was near to value with the sky color.

We had a full pit orchestra for the play, and I designed a walkway or ramp in front of the pit that was a few steps down from the regular stage level.  I wanted to bring this play as close to the audience as possible.  I grew up in an intimate theatre, so whenever I can on a proscenium stage I like to put the play in the audiences' laps.  When the script and the production make that appropriate I enjoy doing it.

I think when designing scenery, one must also design the scene changes.  All of the flat scenic pieces were flown in, with furniture schlepped in by way of stagehands when needed.  I was also the Technical Theatre teacher for the semester we did this show and I was tasked with providing the technicians for this production.  The class was almost entirely made up of girls.  There is a stereotype in the theatre that only big burly guys can run the fly system.  This is not the case.  I had four girls from the class perform as deckhands on this show.  To this day, they were the best fly crew I have ever had.  One of the girls was barely a hundred pounds.  Some of the flies were displacing nearly a thousand pounds when you take into account the weight of the scenery plus the weight on the arbor.  In the scene change from New York to Havana, they flew in soft, velour legs in front of the hard legs, then flew the hard legs out.  They reversed this for the transition from Havana to New York.  It was vertigo inducing.  They worked their scene changes and worked them until they could fly the pieces out in perfect unison.  They were amazing scene changes.

The Hot Box scene is set in the interior of a nightclub.  We set footlights at the front of the stage and tables and chairs on the wings.  Then a small proscenium with a curtain was flown in.  There was a lighted sign at the top of the mini-proscenium.  The proscenium was also created in forced perspective.

After the Hot Box scene, there is a transition to the exterior of the mission.  It's a pretty significant scene change and it has the potential to be a long one in any production of Guys and Dolls.  For this reason, the playwright created a small scene with Nathan Detroit on the telephone with Joey Biltmore about renting the garage for the crap game.  It's a delightful scene where Joey is a disembodied voice and Nathan is talking, pleading and sometimes yelling into a phone receiver.  I have seen productions of Guys and Dolls where they created an entire full stage scene change for this small scene and another one where this scene was taken down.  When they did that, the scene change was longer than the scene.  Try as I might, the only thing I remember about those productions are those notorious scene changes.  I resolved to use the scene to mask the scene change as it was written.  We built a phone booth which was situated on house left and was brought in just for that scene.

The Hot Box as described

The phone booth which covered the scene change

The Mission exterior followed the same rules as the rest of the scenery with it's odd perspective.  We hung a piece of clear plexi-glas in the window and painted "Save-A-Soul Mission  Sinners Welcome"  Also, as in the Sunday Funnies, I didn't feel the need to paint every single brick.  I needed to suggest it was made of brick.

The Mission exterior

The door to the mission was a little tricky, but the technical director fixed that by adding a wheel to it so it wouldn't torque and bind when it was opened.

The Havana scene was obviously not set in New York, so as I described earlier, I designed the scene change to remove the hard masking and replace it with soft masking.  This was also done in the transition back to New York.

I imagined the restaurant scene in Havana to be kind of a sidewalk bistro so there were palm trees all around.  My assistant designer was from California and suggested strongly that the palm trees did not look at all like real palm trees.  I assured her that they looked like cartoon palm trees.

When we transitioned back to New York, all of the signs on the buildings were lit since it was a nighttime scene.

Havana with fake palm trees

Back to New York with lighted signs

The Snow Drama Theatre stage has two traps, one on either side of the stage.  I used one of these for the entrance to the sewer.  We put a steel cage around it with a "Men Working" sign on it, created a manhole sized opening and put a ladder out of it.

The tree in this picture was painted to resemble trees you might find in a Bugs Bunny  or Daffy Duck cartoon.

The sewer scene followed the same idea as the New York scene.  A doming pool of magma that has created an uplift.  This one, of course is underground.  All of the tunnels in the backdrop were painted with aerial perspective in mind as well.

The sewer entrance.  Note the paint job on the tree

Sewer scene and drop.

The last major scenic piece for this show was the mission interior.  Once again, it followed the rules of the rest of the show with the strange perspective.  On the interior wall of the mission interior I designed a chalkboard.  On the chalkboard I drew a series of circles connected with lines.  The words on the chalkboard basically said, "If you save just six souls, and each of them save just four souls and each of them save just two souls..."  I had a friend here in town that was an Amway Distributor.  That is the Amway Sales and Marketing Plan translated into a religious context.  When he came to the show he commented on the chalkboard illustration.  I was gratified that he got it.  For the record, I am NOT an Amway Distributor.

The Mission interior with the chalkboard presentation

The Costume Design
Miranda Giles was my assistant costume designer on this show.  I asked Miranda to costume the chorus.   She did very nice work.  Most of the chorus parts she was responsible for took place in the Runyonland segment of the show.  That is the opening choreographed pandemonium set to the overture.  Most productions have this section choreographed down to the beats or transitions in the music.  Ours was no exception.  It looks chaotic but is absolutely organized.  The concept of the director, as you remember was Sunday Funnies.  I think Miranda captured that well.  Here are some samples of her work

The "blind" man and the cop

The photographer and the girls

The boxer

The damsel

The street sweeper.  This is one of my favorite costumes in this segment.
We found a fabric for his shirt that had billiard balls all over it.  Seemed fitting for a play
that was about a game of chance.

Two of the dancehall girls with Miss Adelaide

The Missionaries.  We co-designed these costumes

The Broadway star and the fans

The Texan getting his pocket picked

Before I get further into the costume design, I want to say a few words about this cast.  As a costume designer, when Hyrum cast this show, I knew I could do whatever I wanted with the costumes.  This was a very strong cast, and I knew that whatever clothing I put on them they would top.  Nobody in the cast was lost in their costumes.  They embraced them.  They lived in them.  They acted above them.  A large percentage of these cast members still make some or most of their living doing theatre.  That is remarkable for university theatre.  These were talented people.  And like I said, I knew I could do whatever I wanted with the costumes because of that.

The Gamblers
I'll start with Nathan Detroit.  I found a great suiting fabric that was a purple paisley.  I decided to use a secondary triad for his color combination.  Purple suit, peach for the shirt and teal for the tie.  I used Design Master Color Tool to color his hat.  This was my second costume design at BYU-Idaho and the first one had been a fantastical epic that involved trolls and elves so the Costume Shop Director was unprepared for what was coming.  She questioned the secondary triad right up until she saw it under theatre lights and then she understood.

Nathan Detroit and Miss Adelaide

We used to have a fabric store called Home Fabrics.  It was upholstery and drapery fabrics and they had a huge clearance area.  They never sent anything back to the weavers.  It stayed in the store until it sold.  Much of the fabric there had great large patterns, damasks and weaves.  Everything was sorted by color as well.  Lots of Jacquards.  Most of the gamblers were outfitted in fabric from that store.  Sadly, the owner passed away and none of his descendants wanted to run the company and it closed.  They had several stores in several states.

The stitchers who worked in the costume shop were not happy with me because they had to sew on the upholstery fabric and the drapery fabric.  I was referred to as "The Devil" and as "Satan" and as "Lucifer" when I'd come into the shop.  I didn't mind, because I knew how the costumes would turn out.  I sat behind them on the final dress rehearsal and one of the girls turned to me at intermission and said, "I'll sew costumes for you anytime."  She later beaded a cape for me on my costume design for A Comedy of Errors.

In the original script, only a few of the gamblers are named.  Nicely Nicely Johnson, Benny Southstreet, Harry the Horse, Big Jule are the main named gamblers.  In our version, the cast members were asked to go into the Damon Runyon stories and find a named gambler and assume that character.  They were given program credit under those names.  Each gambler had a persona and I designed their outfits to coincide with their character names.  I looked for fabric that reminded me of games.  I also designed a few gamblers in double breasted suits, single breasted suits and zoot suits.  Variety.  Here are the gamblers in no apparent order.

Sky Masterson was dressed in a blue, double breasted suit, because Sky.

Sky Masterson.  I think all men look better in a double breasted suit.
That is why I put the hero of the play in one.

Big Jule is a Chicago gangster.  I found this striped drapery fabric that
reminded me of prison bars.  The zoot suit made the length of the prison
bars even better

The guy on the right was Harry the Horse.  Big Jule's friend, also from Chicago,
so I put him in a zoot suit as well.  The guy on the left chose the name,
Rusty Charlie from the Damon Runyon literature.  We chose a rust colored check
fabric, because of the name and the game aspect of the pattern.

Benny Southstreet, Nicely Nicely Johnson and Rusty Charlie

Good-Time Charlie Bernstan and Society Max.  I found this incredible upholstery
fabric that lookedlike a backgammon board.  The costume shop director matched
 the pattern on the back seam and the side seams, and cursed my name every day! 

Dave the Dude, Rusty Charlie, Scranton Slim and Angie the Ox

Benny the Blonde Jew and Brandy Bottle Bates with checkerboard motifs

Harry the Horse, Nick The Greek, and Liverlips Louie.  Liverlips Louie was a gambler in the Runyon stories.  I found a great striped fabric that had the color scheme of spoiled liver.  There was a deep purple, a rust and a goldenrod stripe in this fabric.  Looked like liver.  Had to use it so we made a double breasted suit out of it and gave him a machine gun in a violin case.

All the gamblers.  "Good Ole Reliable Nathan"

"I will bet you the same thousand dollars that you do not know the color of the necktie you have on."  

The Mission

I found a really nice crepe for the mission costumes.  It hung nice and we cut it on the bias to drape better.  The mission costumes were basically all the same, except there were male versions and female versions.  The males were in dark trousers with the red suit jacket and a militariesque hat.  The females had a red skirt, a jacket, a cape and a bonnet.  Since Sarah was an officer, she had a little trim on her cape.  The General was in a more tailored suit with medals, ribbons and epaulets.  Her hat was a U.S. Navy female officer's cap recovered and blinged up

The missionaries

General Cartwright and Sky Masterson

Sarah and Uncle Arvide.

For Sarah's Havana look I found an image of a period suit and adapted it for the character and the part.  I also found a very soft cream crepe and we built a suit for her, trimmed in light blue crepe.  It was quite a pretty outfit.  One of my favorites in the show.  Sky was in a Hawaiian shirt for Havana.

Sky and Sarah in the Havana outfits

The Hot Box Girls

I'll talk about "Take Back Your Mink" first.  This number is supposed to be a striptease.  I work at a religious school.  We wanted to use the song but we weren't going to do the strip.  You can think we are prudish if you like.  I don't care.  Even on Broadway it wasn't performed as a full strip, just a tease.  It can be provocative though.  Instead of the strip, each girl had a shopping bag like you might find at a fine department store and all of the items mentioned in the song next to it that they would normally strip off in a different production.  As they sang about each item, they took it in their hands and one by one stuffed it in the bag.  The only things they took off their bodies were the mink and the pearls.  Everything else was done the other way.  It's how we chose to do it because we know our audience.  Being in a religious community, if we had done the striptease even though no nudity is ever shown in the number, the play would have only been about the striptease.  It would have scandalized our audience and they would have thought of nothing else.  

The striptease that wasn't a striptease

I talked about "Take Back Your Mink" first because I like the costumes for "Bushel and a Peck" better and I wanted to save them, even though chronologically they come earlier in the play.

Miss Adelaide and her Farmerettes.  I decided to dress the girls in complementary colors, but in pastels.  I found a gingham check in pastel blue, green, yellow, peach, pink and lavender.  I thought that these outfits should be just a little delightfully tacky.  The girls in the baby blue gingham skirts had peach blouses. the girls in pink gingham skirts had green blouses, and so on and so forth.  The skirts were circle skirts with suspenders and each girl wore two square dance petticoats underneath.  The blouse was a peasant blouse and they each had a bonnet.  Then I had each girl in Opera Hose to remind us we were in a dancehall.  I fit each of the girls in old character shoes, then I painted them with Design Master Color Tool to correspond with their skirts.  I didn't ask, I just did it.  The main costume designer was pretty upset with me over that one.  I still don't feel bad because it was the right choice.  In fact, I painted the Hot Box Girls' shoes, I painted the Gamblers wingtip shoes to match their costumes and I painted the Mission Girls' shoes to match their outfits. 

"I Love You, a Bushel and a Pack"

Miss Adelaide
I have been fortunate twice in my career to have the right kind of show and the right kind of actress that was strong enough so I could wig her in a different hair color in every scene and the audience would know who she was.  The other show was She Stoops to Conquer.

Our Miss Adelaide was just such an actress.  We wigged her in raven, auburn, red, straw, blond and platinum.  There may have been a strawberry blonde in there as well.  Every costume for her was designed and built except the wedding dress.  That one was pulled.  I tried to talk Hyrum into just a veil but he said she had been preparing for this day for fourteen years, you would think she'd have a dress.  Here are the looks for Miss Adelaide

First look with Raven wig.  Most of her clothes had a purple element to tie her into Nathan

I found a great chenille fabric for her robe and slippers.  She was blonde for this

Her out about town look.  She was in an auburn wig for this one.  This is where Nathan lies about the wedding

She sang Adelaide's Lament in this outfit.  The one with the least purple.
We made her gloves out of the same fabric as her dress.  I believe this outfit
was the one where she was strawberry blonde.

This is the outfit for "Sue Me."  Her wig was straw for this one.

The wedding.  We used the same straw wig for this because she only had 17 seconds to change from the purple capris and blouse into full wedding regalia.  She did it in 12.

I want to say something about professionalism here.  I have worked with many Broadway actors.  Tony Award winners and Nominees.  Emmy Award winners and nominees.  I have worked with alot of people at the highest level in theatre.  The girl who played Miss Adelaide was one of the most professional actors I have ever worked with.  It didn't hurt that her mother was a legendary High School Drama teacher.  She gave performance level intensity from her audition all the way to the final curtain on the show.  She was a dream to work with during tech rehearsals because she gave the real stuff so the technicians could get the proper timing.  She didn't mark.  When the stage manager said, "Hold" she stopped immediately.  When the stage manager said, "Go talent."  She went right back into full intensity, instantly.  I hope I don't embarrass her with saying this.  I hope actors who read this far will consider what I have said here.

I enjoyed working on this show a great deal.  I have done Guys and Dolls at least four times in my career.  Each one was a joy to work on.  This one may have been the best.

Production Details
Directed by:  Hyrum Conrad
Scene Design by:  Gary Benson
Assistant Scene Designer:  Megan O'Neil
Costume Design by:  Gary Benson
Assistant Costume Designer:  Miranda Giles
Lighting Design by:  Robert W. Nelson
Sound Master:  Michael Bishop
Technical Director:  Ray Versluys
Costume Shop Director:  Patty Randall