Following your heart is far from easy. Just ask Nathan Detroit.

“I’ve been avoiding getting married to Adelaide for the whole show, and then she has finally had enough.… I’ve just been broken up with by my fiancée of 14 years,”  Zach Green ’28, who plays Nathan in this weekend’s production of “Guys and Dolls,” said.

Nathan Detroit loves Miss Adelaide, the aforementioned fiancée, but his second, often more alluring love—his underground gambling ring—keeps getting in the way. His predicament captures the dilemmas at the center of the musical: When humans let love lead in all its diverging directions, will things work out in the end?

“Guys and Dolls,” the fall theater production from the Department of Theater and Dance, is a classic Golden Age musical set in the heart of 1950s Manhattan. The show follows a mishmash cast of gamblers, showgirls and Christian missionaries all trying to find their way around life’s pressures, twists and turns. Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance Jessica Pearson-Bleyer directs the show.

“It’s described in so many places … as the perfect musical comedy,” Pearson-Bleyer said. “It really holds up.”

Matthew O'Meara

Matthew O'Meara

Matthew O'Meara

Matthew O'Meara

The show revolves around four central characters: Nathan Detroit and Miss Adelaide (Amaya Reddy ’27); Sarah Brown (Colette Carillo ’26), the missionaries’ chief proselytizer; and Sky Masterson (Reynaldo Fuentez ’26), a grandiose and legendary bettor. Although their story hardly resembles that of Nathan and Adelaide, Sarah’s and Sky’s paths, however different, will also cross.

Framed by scaffolding and Broadway signs projected above the stage, the production’s set is simple but welcomes audiences to the heyday of the Big Apple in the years following World War II. The cast also speaks in midcentury New York accents, something Carrillo said Pearson-Bleyer emphasized.

Beyond the show’s accuracy to the period, director and actors alike pointed to the strength and authenticity of character performances in bringing 1950s-era New York to a contemporary audience.

“[Pearson-Bleyer] places such a heavy emphasis on the authenticity of each performer, and that has allowed us to explore the characters in completely new ways,” Carrillo said. “She’s let me bring out so much more humor in Sarah, [even though] Sarah is typically played as the straight girl, and Adelaide’s the more funny one.”

Both Carrillo and Green highlighted the stellar supporting roles of gambler sidekicks Nicely-Nicely Johnson (Franceska Drejaj ’27) and Benny Southstreet (Declan O’Connell ’27). Comic interchanges between the two frequently follow heavier emotional moments between the lead characters.

“Their chemistry is so palpable,” Carrillo said. “That’s just a miracle of casting.… [Pearson-Bleyer] just knows how to cast people in a way that will play to their strengths.”

Pearson-Bleyer noted that her casting choices were designed not only to play to actors’ strengths but also to accurately and fairly depict the characters’ social milieu.

“People have this very structured idea of what the [1950s] looked like.… I wanted to capture this old, weird New York,” Pearson-Bleyer said. “In terms of gender … and the way we did costuming, these things are not necessarily as inauthentic to 1950 as I think the people in the audience are going to think at first.”

The show includes a number of actors, including Drejaj, who cross gender lines in their performances, but—despite its title—the idiosyncrasies of “Guys and Dolls” lie in its characters’ needs, flaws and dreams, not their presentation.

“[‘Guys and Dolls’] is not about binary gender roles; It’s about extremes,” Carrillo added. “Sky and Sarah exist at both ends, and Sarah is very passionate.… She slowly realizes the things she thinks are true are not.”

Perhaps none more so than Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown, characters throughout the show who are forced to rethink their beliefs, and even their identities, when a surprise walks through the door.

Like anyone in the 1950s or today, the show’s personalities can be selfish, stubborn and even mean, but they keep following their hearts wherever they lead, a path more tenuous for some characters than others.

“[Nathan] gets it even though he doesn’t earn it,” Green said. “He’s been terrible to Adelaide, but he still marries her, and they’re still happy.”

“It’s a show about [how] there’s no such thing as a lost cause,” Carrillo added.

The show brought Pickard Theater to full capacity for its opening performance last night and runs through tonight and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Hopeful showgoers may be out of luck: All shows are sold out, but any seats left available will be distributed at the box office.