Last night, the new revival of Guys and Dolls opened on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre, and today the voice of the Broadway critics can be heard discussing the production. The opening night critics for the show are unanimous in their displeasure with the production, finding fault with the produciton’s conception and execution. Unifying themes among the majority of critcs’ reviews were the production’s lack of “charm,” performers’ lack of “charisma,” and the production’s inability to entertain. The tone among most reviewers is one of disappointment rather than derision, but the overall response to this production from the critics is overwhelmingly negative. Below is a sampling of reviews:

• … honey, there ain’t no chemistry in your show: not between the two pairs of leading lovers, or between the singers and their songs, or the actors and their parts.
-Ben Brantley, New York Times

• Mary Testa, otherwise winningly droll as a Salvation Army general, is forced to interrupt Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat with a tacky mock-diva solo. Given such transgressions, this Guys and Dolls never stays afloat long enough to transport us.
-Elysa Gardner, USA Today

• Des McAnuff’s uneven, charm-challenged production doesn’t entirely kill that pleasure, no matter how hell-bent on wreckage it sometimes seems to be.
-Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg

• Talent notwithstanding, and there is a lot of it, this “Guys and Dolls” is so leaden and uninspired, it might as well be called “Men and Women.”
-Roma Torre, NY1

• The trouble with Jersey Boys director Des McAnuff’s Broadway revival is that too often it plays like a very good community theater production, albeit one with considerably pricier sets.
-Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly

• What’s missing in this ambitious production, which opened Sunday at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre, is the raffish charm – and more importantly – the brash humor of Damon Runyon’s stories about the high and low-life denizens of Times Square.
-Michael Kuchwara, AP

• McAnuff serves up a simultaneously razzmatazz and tawdry affair, which, despite Frank Loesser’s dazzling score and Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows’ top-drawer zingers, never fully transports audiences to a mythic New York,where a kind of perpetual sense of hopefulness exists, even when things are at their worst.
-Andy Propst, Theatermania

• Most of the cast appears lost and confused.
-Matt Windman, am New York

• Des McAnuff’s strangely cast, uncharacteristically insecure and weirdly unfunny revival-which features Oliver Platt as the perennial bachelor Nathan Detroit and “Gilmore Girl” Lauren Graham as Miss Adelaide-seems to have about six different concepts for this show, tries to do them all at once, and manages to make none of them land.
-Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

• Fronted by four likable leads whose collective charisma never rises above medium wattage, the production sucks the personality out of an American musical-theater classic.
-David Rooney, Variety