When Mary Zimmerman asked Doug Peck to join her as music director and orchestrator for Guys and Dolls, he jumped at the chance. It’s not the first time he has worked with Zimmerman. Both are Chicago-based, and they paired up for the Goodman Theatre’s Candide, which featured a new script by Zimmerman. The show went on to play in Washington, D.C., and Boston. They also collaborated on a musical production of The Jungle Book for Disney, which played at the Goodman and the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston.

In 2004, Peck worked on Guys and Dolls at Chicago’s Court Theatre. “It was a very different production with a different orchestration,” he said in an interview at OSF. “The orchestration I’m creating for OSF is completely new.”

This orchestration, he said, takes into account both the “wonders of the original score” and his inspiration from the many cover recordings that jazz artists have done of these songs, particularly Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Barbra Streisand. Peck is especially inspired by Chet Baker. “His recordings of Guys and Dolls are intimate in a way that captures the feel of this production.”

Big sound, smaller band

When Guys and Dolls first premiered, the original orchestra was much larger than any orchestra used today, some 25-plus. “It’s a brilliant orchestration,” he says, “it’s the original composer guiding the orchestrators through his thoughts of how that show should sound in a 2,000-seat house.”

Obviously that’s not the same sound for an eight-piece orchestra in the more intimate 600-seat Angus Bowmer Theatre. “Working with my new instrumentation of eight players, I decided who plays what when,” Peck explains. “Some of the supporting lines are from the original orchestration and some of them are new, but the combination of instrumental textures is inspired by 1930s Big Band jazz.”

His jumping-off point to find the eight instruments was the Hot Box nightclub, where the character Adelaide works. That 1930s Hot Box band would have had piano, bass, drums and horns. The OSF band has piano, bass, drums, three woodwinds and two brass. Fortuitously, the Big Bands of the 1930s were smaller than those of the ’50s and more like the OSF band. This smaller band supports the intimacy of the numerous duets, so the audience can better hear the songs.

Peck writes his orchestrations during rehearsal, enabling him to work with the actors and see how the songs are sung, staged and choreographed. He works a day or two behind the staging and then gets rewrites to the musicians.

He clearly enjoys his partnership with Zimmerman and particularly respects the way the two of them can lean into the intimacy of a musical, rather than striving for bigger, broader and funnier.

“Mary is relatively new to musicals,” he says, “and watching someone with her intellectual pedigree come to a musical like this and direct it as if it’s a Greek or Shakespearean or operatic masterpiece is great for someone like me who was born and raised in musicals.”

Zimmerman, he says, has gravitated toward some of the scenes that are traditionally less interesting and “directed them to the hilt. The acting is so strong, and Mary has captured the joy and fun of the piece, and I’ve tried to bring out those qualities in the music.”

For more information about Guys and Dolls, click here.

For a story about Mary Zimmerman, click here.

For a video of Peck in rehearsal, click here.