Argot

Advantages: Classic musical, performed with pizzazz
Disadvantages: Not quite Runyon, but then what, apart from Runyon, is?

..., with the first production appearing, appropriately enough, on Broadway in 1950. Damon Runyon himself never wrote for stage or screen, although by an ironic coincidence he was commissioned not long before his death in 1946 to script a Hollywood picture to star Bing Crosby - and hence presumably a musical. That script was never completed. Between them, Loesser, Burrows and Swerling did manage to recreate something of Runyon's unique world, but the Broadway of Guys and Dolls is subtly different from the Broadway of the original stories. One enjoys the stories for the narrative style, the verbal humour and the improbable, outsize characters. The improbability is offset by the sheer enjoyment to be derived from Runyon's language - a vernacular of his own invention, though drawing heavily on all the ethnic New York argots he heard around him... Read review

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