The Actors Company Theatre is celebrating Christmas early this year. The reason has to be because, while celebrating the outfit’s 25th season, the producing team has decided to call it quits. Therefore waiting until Yuletide might have meant no Three Wise Guys at all.
That would be a crying shame—or, put it another way, it could have prompted 2018 Adelaides to chant a new lament. Why? Because TACT’s parting shot is simply too, too good.
You see, just as Abe Burrows spun the 1950 Guys and Dolls—with the great Frank Loesser score—from Damon Runyon’s stories of Times Square tough guys. You know the crowd of characters, one of whose outstanding traits is avoiding contractions at all costs.
So Scott Alan Evans, the company’s executive artistic director, has mined Runyon’s stories “Dancing Dan’s Christmas” and “The Three Wise Guys” with co-bookwriter Jeffrey Couchman for an adorable new wise-guy fable. It’s so lovable that regional theaters artistic directors across the land would be their own guys and dolls to program the piece this very year as a seasonal treat.
In Three Wise Guys it’s Christmas Eve, 1932 at the West 46th Street speakeasy where Good Time Charley (terrific Ron McClary) is dispenses the hot toddies. At the sound of knocking on the front door, he welcomes The Dutchman (terrific Joel Jones), Blondy Swanson (terrific Karl Kenzler) and Dancing Dan (terrific Jeffrey C. Hawkins), who’s just lifted a diamond (this has been seen in silhouette on a downstage sheet) and is on the lam.
The three guys—not a one of them so wise about suspicious careers—are grousing about their plights and looking to change direction. The most obvious is The Dutchman, reduced for the night to playing Santa Claus in the standard red-and-white get-up. Angry about it, he’s glad to shed the suit, hat and beard and hand it to Dancing Dan, who’s happy to become a dancing St. Nick.
That’s when hard-nosed bootlegger Heine Schmitz (terrific John Plumpis) arrives in high mobster dudgeon. He’s looking for Dancing Dan, because he believes rightly that Dancing Dan has not only made off with the bangle he wanted for his supposed girlfriend, showgirl Muriel O’Neill (Terrific Victoria Mack) but that Dan has also been birddogging the lovely Muriel.
Because Dan is hunched over in the Santa drag, the Dutchman and Blondy fob Schmitz off but then need to skip town with the heisted jewel. This leads the trio on a spree that involves detouring to a Long Island Christmas Eve party, where swanky Mrs. Elizabeth Albright, also known as Bitsy (terrific Dana Smith-Croll), lords it over barely competent butler Myrton (McClary terrific again). In addition, she’s hostess to, of all people, Heine Schmitz, and to, of all other people, Muriel.
To call what follows a wild goose chase is to invite the Understatement Police to siren up. There’s no call to go any further than to say that the three wise guys eventually show up at a barn where Blondy finds his ex-squeeze Gammer O’Neill (Smith-Croll terrific again) going into labor.
So the audience gets to enjoy the three wise guys showing up in a stable on a late Christmas Eve when a woman is delivering a baby boy. Any readers thinking that the “Guy” in the Evans-Couchman work is a loving bow to Guy and Dolls but that the “Wise“ is an allusion to something more Biblical won’t have their hunch pooh-poohed here.
Although in Three Wise Guys there are renderings of “Hava Nagila” and “Will You Love me in December as You Do in May,” it’s not a musical. (Okay, there are moments when the three wise guys could break into “Fugue for Tinhorns” but don’t.) All the same, director-co-bookwriter Evans has given it the cheerful accouterments of a small tuner with Jason Ardizzone-West’s clever adaptable set, David Toser’s costumes, Dan Scully’s projections designs, Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting, Bart Fasbender’s sound design and Andy Gaukel’s puppet design.
Three Wise Guys –which has little more on its mind than to entertain—is many time’s more jolly than a zippy tree-trimming party. How smart the TACT folks are to close with this winner. It’ll make the company that much more missed.
Three Wise Guys opened at the Beckett on March 11 and closes April 14. Information and tickets: tactnyc.org
