Alhambra To Kick Off 55th Season With GUYS & DOLLS

Guys and Dolls, one of the most revered musicals in Broadway history, will open the Alhambra's 55th season on January 13, 2022.

Winner of the 1950 Tony Award for Best Musical, Guys and Dolls is one of the first musicals about the actual street called Broadway as New York City's vital thoroughfare, not the theatrical Broadway of kick-lines and curtain calls. This is the first time Guys & Dolls has not been produced at the Alhambra Theatre and Dining since owner Craig Smith took over the venerable theater in 2009.

Set in Depression-era Times Square, Guys and Dolls is about two big city gamblers and the women who love them. It tells the overlapping stories of high-roller Sky Masterson, who falls in love with mission worker Sarah Brown, and charming troublemaker Nathan Detroit, engaged for 14 years to Miss Adelaide, a headliner at the Hot Box Club. Nathan runs a famous floating craps game, and an ongoing plot line involves his quest for a safe place for the game as Adelaide continues her quest to convince him to marry her. Meanwhile, Sarah, mistakenly believing that Sky set up an illegal game at the mission, tries to fight her affection for him.

The Alhambra's production will feature real-life husband and wife team, Jason Nettles as Sky Masterson and and Katie Nettles as Miss Adelaide. Both have been featured before on the Alhambra stage, and were last in the same production for Beauty and the Beast in 2016. They met while students at University of Central Florida in 2011 and were married in 2013. Jason asked Katie (then Hensley) to marry him on the Alhambra stage during White Christmas. Jason is the Theater Arts teacher Ponte Vedra High School, where he has helped the students produce shows including Pippin, High School Musical and Chicago. Katie last appeared in at the Alhambra during Footloose in 2021.

Guys and Dolls premiered on Broadway in 1950, where it ran for 1,200 performances and won the Tony Award for Best Musical. The musical has had several Broadway and London revivals, as well as a 1955 film adaptation starring Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine. Guys and Dolls was selected as the winner of the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. However, because of writer Abe Burrows' communist sympathies as exposed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the Trustees of Columbia University vetoed the selection, and no Pulitzer for Drama was awarded that year. In 1998, the original Broadway cast of the 1950 cast album was posthumously inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Said Smith, the Managing Partner of the Alhambra, "We have been holding out on Guys & Dolls for a special occasion and to produce with a special cast. Kicking off our 55th season and having Jason and Katie both available is that moment."

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