Students show their age in ‘Guys and Dolls’

When Las Vegas Academy theater is at its best, you often forget you're watching students tackling adult roles. But in "Guys and Dolls," you're almost always aware that high-schoolers are trying to imitate characters they know little about.

Frank Loesser's brilliant music and lyrics, coupled with Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling's rollicking book, put us in Damon Runyon land, where the only purpose in life is to shoot craps. It's full of likable hustlers who recognize only one mortal sin: the reneging of an IOU.

I've never met anyone who grew up in blue-collar New York City who didn't understand the heart of Runyon's world. But here, the best director Jill C. Sosniak can get from nearly all of her 53-member cast (backed by a robust 40-member orchestra) is bad imitations of television stereotypes.

When you see a drunk drinking from a bottle while sprawled on the street, you don't really think she's a drunk. She's a young actress faking an image. When most of the guys sing of the excitement of rolling dice, you feel as if they don't have a clue what a pair of dice even feels like.

The show, which has one of the best scores in American musical comedy history, is extremely well-sung. But "Guys and Dolls" needs characterizations more than beautiful notes.

Patrick Weaver's set is strangely unappealing. His penchant for gray and barnyard brown makes perhaps the most exciting city in the world look like Detroit. And Tim Craskey's choreography is illogical and by-the-numbers. (A comic number about a cold is played as if the singer is about to do a striptease. What's up with that?)

The charmingly double-talking Casey Andrews, though (double-cast in the lead role of Sky Masterson), looks young but is able to get us to believe he's a middle-aged man with serious problems. And Keaton Johns, despite his baby face, convinces us that he belongs in this adult environment.

He and Andrews are a reminder that actors can substitute creative imagination for lack of real-life experience. Unless there's something in their backgrounds I don't know about.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.