Singing, Dancing and Banking : A flood of musical revivals, including ‘Guys and Dolls,’ shows that audiences still go for a good time. Do you really need to ask why?

“Guys and Dolls” may be one of the most familiar musicals around, but you’d never know it from talking to producer Michael David. When David and partners at Dodger Productions got set to restage the 1950 classic on Broadway, they were determined to treat it as if it were a new show.

Revivals may have name recognition, he thought, but they also traditionally have a limited lifetime. So, David says, “I set up this rule: You could not describe ‘Guys and Dolls’ with any word that began with R.”

The producers spent $5.5 million--very high for a revival--on the show, which opened in April, 1992. Director Jerry Zaks, set designer Tony Walton, costume designer William Ivey Long and everyone else came up with a production that was, in the words of fellow producer Roger Berlind, “a brand-new first-class musical.”

It worked. The Broadway reincarnation of “Guys and Dolls” broke sales records, and the show is still playing to full houses. With a new cast headed by Lorna Luft, a touring clone of that production arrives at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on Thursday.

Part of the allure, of course, is the sheer wonderfulness of “Guys and Dolls.” With lyrics like “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York” and vivid characters like the eternally engaged, sneeze-prone Adelaide, “Guys and Dolls” is difficult to resist.

“I think there’s always room for great book musicals,” says Freddie Gershon, chairman of Music Theatre International, the dramatic rights licensing agency that has made a bundle licensing the show to everyone but Broadway over the years. “But it’s very, very rare that every single song is a showstopper, known and melodic. It’s rare to have four key parts, including two romances, and laughs. There isn’t an extra line or scene.”

The current production’s success is also due, of course, to the skill of a creative team headed by four-time Tony winner Zaks. Opting for comic exaggeration and stylization, he and colleagues create a Technicolor New York where crime is benign and tough guys are colorful.

But also at play is a more fiscally conservative Broadway. Just three new musicals are opening there this fall: “A Grand Night for Singing,” a compilation of Rodgers & Hammerstein songs; “Cyrano,” an import from Holland based on the 1897 play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and “The Red Shoes,” based on the classic 1948 film of the same name. “Paper Moon,” another musical based on a film, was recently postponed.

Past successes look very good to Broadway producers. Years of effort and frustration accompany even the few musicals that actually pay back their $5-million to $10-million price tags.

So along comes “Guys and Dolls,” proving that good old stuff done well makes good new stuff. Standard revivals usually have short life expectancies, small budgets and limited tour possibilities, David says, adding: “We redefined the limitations traditionally attached to revivals.”

Zaks agrees. “The idea of doing revivals certainly got a boost from ‘Guys and Dolls’ and from ‘Gypsy’ before that,” he says, referring to the 1989 production with Tyne Daly. “Because of the dearth of book musicals, with music, dancing, acting and story grounded in some recognizable reality, directors and others who want to do them are inclined to re-investigate the old ones.”

Consider the people involved with some of the other revivals headed toward Broadway now. Harold Prince just opened a new version of “Show Boat” in Toronto (amid controversy because of charges that it propagates racial stereotypes) and Tommy Tune is planning to bring back “Grease” in the spring. Even Zaks’ next musical is a revival, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“Beauty and the Beast,” an elaborate stage version of the hugely popular 1991 Disney animated film, opens on Broadway in April. But first come a revival of “My Fair Lady” this fall and, next spring, a production of “Damn Yankees,” which is currently playing at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. Lincoln Center Theater is bringing in London’s National Theatre revival of “Carousel” next spring too, and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” could be in New York next fall.

Zaks gets upward of 10 musicals a year to look at, but, he says, “I haven’t read anything recently that made me go, ‘Whoa, I have to do this. I have to commit to this.’ I haven’t come across too many new musicals that combine a first-rate book with first-rate score and first-rate lyrics.”

That certainly wasn’t a problem with “Guys and Dolls,” among the most durable and popular of all American musicals. Subtitled “a musical fable of Broadway,” it opened Nov. 24, 1950 (at a cost of about $250,000). Before it closed 1,200 performances later, it had won eight Tonys and reportedly grossed more than $12 million.

Plenty of talent went into the original “Guys and Dolls” mix. Based primarily on the Damon Runyon short story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” the musical was built on Loesser’s music and lyrics and a book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. A 1955 film version starred Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons and Vivian Blaine, who re-created her Broadway role of Adelaide.

“Guys and Dolls” was revived at London’s National Theatre in 1982, but it last played Broadway in 1976 (with an all-black cast headed by Robert Guillaume, Los Angeles’ onetime “Phantom of the Opera”).

“We wanted a new production,” says Loesser’s widow, Jo Sullivan, “and we had three producers vying for the rights.”

All three producers wanted director Zaks, Sullivan says, and Zaks didn’t take much persuasion: “My reaction was very strong and what I like to have at a new show,” the director says. “The book is funny. Listen to these numbers. A great choreographer and cast, and we’re off and running.”

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“Interest in music theater, however we define that term, has never been greater,” says composer-librettist Eric Salzman, co-founder and artistic director of the Philadelphia-based American Music Theater Festival. “That applies to creators, producers and audiences. It’s like an art form whose time has come. And come again.”

Everybody loves musicals. Both attendance and dollar grosses on Broadway the past several years have steadily climbed, the League of American Theatres and Producers reports, and last season musicals represented 73% of the audience and a whopping 84% of the ticket dollars on Broadway.

A substantial number of those theatergoers head for shows by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his French counterparts Alain Boublil & Claude-Michel Schonberg, creators of “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon.” There’s less of a language problem for foreign tourists and plenty of spectacle to reward the high costs of show-going.

Now comes this successful wave of revivals. Perhaps, as some critics have theorized, theatergoers are just looking for a middle ground between big-budget imports and the intellectual rigor of Stephen Sondheim.

Anyone who saw either “Crazy for You” (the “new” hit Gershwin musical) or the new Broadway revival of “She Loves Me” (a tale of love by letter in a perfume shop) knows that these are shows pleasing to the spirit as well as to the eye and ear.

“I hoped that the opening moment in ‘Guys and Dolls’ would be a springboard into an evening that’s all about joy,” Zaks says. “Just pure simple joy.”

Classic Broadway musicals never really went away; they just play to different audiences. There have been 18,000 non-Broadway productions of “Guys and Dolls” alone since 1950, for instance. And where would America’s dozens of civic light operas be without “Oklahoma!” or “Chicago” or “Man of La Mancha”?

“The reason there are so many revivals is it’s so expensive to have courage and vision to do a new musical,” says Jeff Rowland, vice president of PolyGram Diversified Entertainment, a producer of both the coming “Damn Yankees” revival and “Jelly’s Last Jam.” “There’s no limit to what you can lose.”

People go with what is safe, he says. “You see it in movies, with sequels. Recording artists who have succeeded get the best deals. It’s all a function of the same thing.”

But there is no sure thing in theater. Producer Berlind, for instance, has poured six years and about $2.5 million into the new musical “Paper Moon.” There were three presentations, including two at Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood, and Broadway previews were expected to start later this month. But worried that his show was “just 75% or 80% of the way there,” he last month put sets in storage and launched rewrites.

So producers hedge their bets. “Guys and Dolls” is also one of few musicals, including revivals, that went straight to Broadway without stopping first in regional theaters or elsewhere.

In Southern California alone, the Mark Taper Forum helped develop “Jelly’s Last Jam,” and the La Jolla Playhouse sent on both “Big River” and “Tommy.” The Old Globe premiered “Into the Woods” as well as the “Damn Yankees” revival.

“It’s nice when you can open out of town in a resident theater, then close down for six months to rework the book or the music or whatever,” says Jujamcyn Theaters President Rocco Landesman. “Time is a tremendous luxury in the development of the project.”

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Theater tastes tend to be cyclical, says Martin Bell, who ran the short-lived 1990 New Musicals Program at the State University of New York’s Purchase campus, where “Kiss of the Spider Woman” was developed.

“Reactions take two years,” says Bell, now vice president for creative affairs at Live Entertainment, Canada. “The reaction now is to ‘Guys and Dolls’ and ‘Crazy for You.’ People are jumping on that bandwagon.”

It isn’t just straight revivals either. As the Roundabout Theatre opens its Rodgers & Hammerstein revue, “A Grand Night for Singing,” on Broadway, here at home the Pasadena Playhouse premieres “Sweet, Smart Rodgers & Hart” next Sunday, and “Cole,” a Cole Porter revue, opens Nov. 17 at the Henry Fonda Theatre. La Jolla Playhouse just closed its Harold Arlen revue at the end of last month.

But don’t expect the situation to last indefinitely. Bell is already predicting that the next cycle will react to more recent musicals like “Falsettos,” “Spider Woman,” “Tommy” and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which he considers more “adventurous.”

The question, of course, is where those new adventurous musicals will come from. Musicals don’t just happen. Although “Passione d’ Amore,” the newest collaboration of Sondheim and writer-director James Lapine, is probably headed to Broadway after a relatively brief writing-and-workshop period, most composers, lyricists and others talk of several years in gestation.

For his new musical, “The Iron Man,” Pete Townshend says he got the rights to poet Ted Hughes’ children’s story in 1985 and wrote a draft treatment “there and then.” He wrote 10 songs for it during the next two years, then recorded it as an album in 1989. After it opens at London’s Young Vic Theatre later this month, Townshend expects it to then tour Britain “to further perfect it.”

British lyricist Don Black, whose credits include such Lloyd Webber shows as “Aspects of Love” and “Sunset Boulevard,” also worries that not enough new talent is coming along.

“People seem to think that out there, somewhere, there are dozens of budding Irving Berlins,” he says. “I can guarantee you, they are not there. In England, I’m chairman of the Vivian Ellis Prize, and I can tell you, most of the (entries) were appalling.”

It’s the same in the United States, implies Sue Frost, associate producer at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, where perhaps 20 of each year’s 300 or 400 submissions show promise.

“The ones that are any good are by names. Most of the ones we get unsolicited are not good,” she says. “Everybody has a song in his heart. We get (submissions) from dentists and doctors; they wouldn’t think they could sit down and compose an opera or create a sculpture, but the American Dream is that everyone wants to write a big hit musical.”

Experts say, however, that it takes years to learn the craft. Sondheim learned from Oscar Hammerstein II, who lived down the road. And, producer David says: “There aren’t people (today) who get that practical experience. You get better as you do. It’s about opportunities for practice.”

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The good news is the increasing number of training programs in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. Bell, whose new program in Toronto has more than $750,000 a year for writers, workshops and readings, counts up seven major organizations like his with money, theaters and a genuine desire to do musicals. In New York alone, British mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh has divided $1 million for musical development among Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizons and Manhattan Theatre Club.

Singer-songwriter Hollye Leven, for instance, worked on her musical “Funny Business” at the Taper Lab here a few years ago. Her show, which she describes as “ ‘A Chorus Line’ for comics,” is backed by PolyGram and is currently assembling a creative team to launch an out-of-town, pre-Broadway tryout.

Leven, who has spent seven years so far developing her show, says: “I don’t think there’s a lot of hip, contemporary stuff out there about to hit the stage. For the last 10 years, while people should have been writing their musicals, there was only lip service. The ticket-buying public in their 30s, 40s and 50s grew up on rock ‘n’ roll and folk, but the old guard was afraid to pass the buck down.”

Black, former chairman of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, agrees that it usually is “an uphill fight just to get a show on.”

“There are people obviously who can write musicals who choose not to. It would take two years to write one, and they can do two or three albums in that period.”

Here too the news appears better. Inspired by the success of “Tommy,” and encouraged by organizations like Dodger Productions (which produced “Tommy”) and Jujamcyn (whose theater plays it), more recording and concert artists might also be wooed to theater.

“What’s accepted, where it’s done and who does it is changing,” says Ira Weitzman, director of musical theater at Lincoln Center Theater. “It’s not just ‘Tommy.’ These guys get older, and musical theater is the intellectual facet of songwriting.”

Singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb has worked on musicals with the late Michael Bennett, Peter Stone (“The Will Rogers Follies”) and novelist Ray Bradbury and has written hundreds of songs as well as five or six full musical scores.

“A lot of people who have been successful in the entertainment business have gone to the trunk and said, ‘I wrote this thing,’ ” producer David says. “ ‘Tommy’ sent a message to people with talent that theater is a place they’re allowed.”