In his obituary for his friend and collaborator, Burrows recalled an exchange that took place after The Most Happy Fella premiere on May 3, 1956: “I came out of the theater in great excitement, dashed up to Frank and began chattering away about the marvelous, funny stuff. Songs like ‘Standing on the Corner Watching All the Girls Go By.’ ‘Abbondanza,’ ‘Big D.’ Suddenly he cut me off angrily. ‘The hell with those! We know I can do that kind of stuff. Tell me where I made you cry.’”30 Not content with the triumph of Guys and Dolls, Loesser wanted to do more in a musical than to entertain and write hit songs. He wanted to make audiences cry. And although the critical praise for Loesser’s most ambitious show about the Napa wine grower and his mail-order bride was far more equivocal than that enjoyed by Guys and Dolls, the view espoused here is that the achievement of The Most Happy Fella is equally impressive and the work itself arguably even greater Loesser.31
Several New York tastemakers praised the show lavishly when it opened at the Imperial Theatre. Robert Coleman headed his review in the Daily Mirror with the judgment, “‘Most Happy Fella’ Is a Masterpiece” and subtitled this endorsement with “Loesser has performed a truly magnificent achievement with an aging play.”32 John McClain of the New York Journal-American encapsulated his reaction in his title, “This Musical Is Great,” and underlying caption, “Loesser’s Solo Effort Should Last as One of Decade’s Biggest.”33
In contrast to the unequivocal acclamation of Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady (which opened less than two months before Fella), however, other New York critics then (and now) would respond negatively to the work’s operatic nature, its surfeit of music, and especially its stylistic heterogeneity, much as they had two decades earlier with Porgy and Bess. Predictably, some New York theater critics wanted a musical to be a traditional musical comedy or a Rodgers and Hammerstein sung play—anything but an opera in Broadway garb.
For these critics, a Janus-faced musical was a sin in need of public censure. Walter Kerr’s remarks in the New York Herald Tribune embody this distaste for works that combine traditional Broadway elements with features associated with European opera: “Still, there’s a little something wrong with ‘Most Happy Fella’—maybe more than a little. The evening at the Imperial is finally heavy with its own inventiveness, weighted down with the variety and fulsomeness of a genuinely creative appetite. It’s as though Mr. Loesser had written two complete musicals—the operetta and the haymaker—on the same simple play and then crammed both into a single structure.”34
Writing in the New York Post, Richard Watts Jr. notes the appropriateness of Loesser’s decision that “most of the music … suggests the more tuneful Italian operas.”35 Nevertheless, Watts is grateful that “the composer has wisely added numbers which, without losing the mood, belong to his characteristic musical comedy manner, and these struck me as the most engaging of the evening.” By the end of his review Watts is urging Loesser to return to “his more successful American idiom.” George Jean Nathan, another critic who regularly expressed disdain for operatic pretensions in a musical, wrote in the New York Journal-American that Loesser “is more at home on his popular musical playground and that the most acceptable portions of his show are those which are admittedly musical comedy.”36 Even New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson, who praised the “great dramatic stature” and “musical magnificence” of the show, voiced “a few reservations about the work as a whole” and concluded that the work “is best when it is simplest,” namely, the songs that most clearly reveal Loesser’s “connections with Broadway.”37
Several weeks later the music critic Howard Taubman evaluated the work in the New York Times.38 While he found much to praise in Loesser’s score, including the operatic duet “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance” and the quartet “How Beautiful the Days,” Taubman criticized in stronger terms than his theater colleague Loesser’s failure “to catch hold of a lyrical expression that is consistent throughout.” He also found fault with the composer-lyricist’s capitulation “to the tyranny of show business” in such numbers as “Standing on the Corner” and “Big D.” In the end Taubman defends his refusal to characterize The Most Happy Fella as an opera: “If it [music] is the principal agent of the drama, if the essential points and moods are made by music, then a piece, by a free-wheeling definition, may be called opera.” Taubman writes that in a music column “it is not considered bad manners to discuss opera,” but he agrees with Loesser’s disclaimer. For Taubman, “The Most Happy Fella is not an opera.”
Times have changed. Thirty-five years and one less-than-ecstatically received production (1979) later, Conrad Osborne, in an essay published several days before its 1991 New York City Opera debut, singled out The Most Happy Fella as one of three operatic musicals—the others were Porgy and Bess and Street Scene—that “have shown a particular durability of audience appeal and a growing (if sometimes grudging) critical reputation.”39 Like his predecessors in 1956 Osborne observed “a tension between ‘serious’ musicodramatic devices and others derived from musical comedy or even vaudeville,” and noted perceptively that “this tension has been responsible for much equivocation about ‘Fella.’”40
Rather than be disturbed by this clash between opera and Broadway, however, Osborne attributes “much of the fascination of the piece” to the same stylistic discrepancies that proved so disconcerting to Atkinson and Taubman.41 Osborne also praises “Loesser’s melodic genius,” his “ability to send his characters’ voices aloft in passionate, memorable song that will take hold of anyone,” and contends that among musicals The Most Happy Fella ranks as “one of the few to which return visits bring new discoveries and richer appreciation.”42
More frequently than not, heterogeneous twentieth-century classical music, especially American varieties, has been subjected to similar criticism. Music that combines extreme contrasts of classical and popular styles, of tonality and atonality, of consonance and dissonance, as found in Mahler, Berg, and Ives, often disturbs more than it pleases listeners who enjoy the more palatable stylistic heterogeneity of Mozart’s Magic Flute. Before the 1970s most critics and audiences found Porgy and Bess, with its hybrid mix of popular hit songs and seemingly less-melodic recitative, at least partially unsettling. In the following chapter it will be suggested that even in My Fair Lady one song, the popular “On the Street Where You Live,” whether or not it was inserted as a concession to popular tastes, clashes stylistically with the other songs in the show.
Similarly, the colliding styles of nineteenth-century Italian opera (“Happy to Make Your Acquaintance”) and Broadway show tunes (“Big D”) practically back-to-back in the same scene provoked strong negative reaction. What Loesser does in The Most Happy Fella is to use a popular Broadway style to contrast his Italian or Italian-inspired characters (and the operatic temperament of Tony’s eventual match, Rosabella) with their comic counterparts and counterpoints, Rosabella’s friend Cleo and her good-natured boyfriend Herman. Between the extremes of “How Beautiful the Days” and “Big D” lie songs like the title song and “Sposalizio,” which are more reminiscent of Italian popular tarantellas such as “Funiculi, Funiculà” than of Verdian opera. Even those who condemn Loesser for selling out cannot fault him for composing songs that are stylistically inappropriate.
Nor will the accusation stick that Loesser undermined operatic integrity by inserting unused “trunk songs” from other contexts. The sixteen sketchbooks tell a different story. In fact, among all of the dozens of full-scale songs and ariosos, only one song, “Ooh! My Feet,” can be traced to an earlier show.43 The sketchbooks reveal that Loesser conceived and developed the more popularly flavored “Standing on the Corner” and “Big D” exclusively for his Broadway opera (what Loesser himself described as a “musical with a lot of music”). In the case of the latter, the solitary extant draft of “Big D” is a rudimentary one from March 1954 (two years before the Boston tryout) that displays most of the rhythm but virtually none of the eventual tune.44 Early rud
imentary sketches for “Standing on the Corner” appear in the first sketchbook (August 1953) and continue in several gradual stages (December 1953 and February, May, and June 1954) before Loesser found a verse and chorus that satisfied him.45
In “Some Loesser Thoughts,” another playbill essay, the composer notes his “feeling for what some professionals call ‘score integration,’” which for Loesser “means the moving of plot through the singing of lyrics.”46 Significantly, Loesser acknowledges that his comic songs do not accomplish this purpose when he writes in his next sentence that “in ‘The Most Happy Fella’ I found a rich playground in which to indulge both my ‘integration’ and my Tin Pan Alley leanings.” His final remarks fan the fuel for those who would accuse Loesser of selling out by making “LOVE” the principal emphasis of his adaptation. For Loesser, not only is love “a most singable subject,” it remains a subject “which no songwriter dares duck for very long if he wants to stay popular and solvent.”
Loesser’s judgment that the Tin Pan Alley songs do not contribute to the “moving of plot” shortchanges the integrative quality of songs such as Cleo’s “Ooh! My Feet” and Herman’s “Standing on the Corner,” which tell us much about the characters who will eventually get together. Since one prefers to sit and the other to stand, even the concepts behind their songs reveal their complementariness. As a show-stopper in the literal sense, “Big D” ranks as perhaps the sole (and welcome) exception to the work’s stature as an integrated musical.
The principal characteristics that unify The Most Happy Fella musically do not always serve dramatic ends. The first of Loesser’s most frequent melodic ideas, the melodic sequence defined earlier (Example 11.4) provides musical unity without dramatic meaning.47 With only a few small exceptions, however, Loesser consistently employs another melodic unifier. This second melodic idea serves as the basis of a melodic family of related motives, melodies in which a descending minor or major second (a half-step or a whole-step) is followed by a wider descending leap that makes forceful dramatic points. A small but representative sample of this ubiquitous melodic stamp is shown in Example 11.6. Loesser’s keen dramatic instincts can be witnessed as the growing intensification of this large family of motives expands throughout the evening from “Benvenuta” (Example 11.6a) to “How Beautiful the Days” (Example 11.6b) and “Warm All Over” (Example 11.6c) to Rosabella’s heartfelt arioso, “I Love Him,” when a minuscule minor second twice erupts into a full and uninhibited octave (Example 11.6d).
Loesser introduces a less familial and more individually significant musical motive after Tony has asked Joe for his picture (see the “Tony” motive in Example 11.7a). Convinced by his sister Marie that he “ain’t young no more,” “ain’t good lookin,’” and “ain’t smart,” the not-so-happy fella has the first of several chats with his deceased Mamma (act I, scene 2): “An’ sometime soon I wanna send-a for Rosabella to come down here to Napa an’ get marry. I gotta send-a Joe’s pitch.’”48 The music that underscores Tony’s dialogue with his mother consists of a repeated “sighing” figure composed of descending seconds on strong beats (appoggiaturas), a familiar figure derived from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operatic depictions of pain and loneliness, underneath a sustained string tremolo that contributes still further to the drama of the moment.49
Example 11.6. The family of motives in The Most Happy Fella (M = major; m = minor; d = diminished; A = augmented; P = perfect)
(a) “Benvenuta”
(b) “How Beautiful the Days”
(c) “Warm All Over”
(d) “I Love Him”
In act II, Marie again feeds her brother’s low self-image despite Rosabella’s assurance that Tony makes her feel “Warm All Over” (in contrast to the “Cold and Dead” response she felt after sleeping with Joe). Consequently, the still-unhappy central character “searches the sky for ‘Mamma’ and finds her up there,” and the original form of his “sighing” returns to underscore a brief monologue. Tony then sings a sad reprise of his sister’s didactic warning, “Young People,” with still more self-flagellating lyrics: “Young people gotta dance, dance, dance, / Old people gotta sit dere an’ watch, watch, watch. / Wit’ da make believe smile in da eye. / Young people gotta live, live, live. / Old people gotta sit dere an’ die.”50
After the potent dramatic moment in the final scene of act II, Rosabella finally convinces Tony that she loves him, not out of pity for an aging invalid but “like a woman needs a man.” To celebrate this long-awaited moment Tony and Rosabella sing their rapturous duet, “My Heart Is So Full of You.” Tony announces that the delayed wedding party will take place that night, and everyone spontaneously dances a hoedown.
The newfound joy of this May-September mailorder romance is shortlived. Rosabella faints from the strain, discovers that she is pregnant with Joe’s baby, and asks Cleo for advice. Tony, with a new self-confidence and overcome by love (he is also somewhat oblivious to Rosabella’s internal anguish), again communicates with his mother over the returning string tremolo and the “sighing” “Tony” motive (Example 11.7a). This time, however, when Tony sings to his mother, Loesser ingeniously converts the “sighing” motive into a passionate arioso of hope and optimism, “Mamma, Mamma” (Example 11.7b). Tony’s sighing motive will return briefly in the final scene of the show on the words “have da baby,” as Tony, “reflecting sadly,” decides to accept Rosabella’s moment of infidelity as well as its consequences. And as he did in “Mamma, Mamma” at the end of act II, Tony successfully converts a motive that had previously reflected sadness, loneliness, and self-pity into positive emotions throughout the ten passionate measures of the abbreviated aria in act III, “She gonna come home wit’ me.”51
Example 11.7. “Tony” motive
(a) original
(b) transformed
Just as Rosabella comes to express her growing love for Tony with ever-expanding intervals, Tony learns to channel the self-pity expressed in his sighing motive. By the end of the musical the “Tony” motive has been transformed into a love that allows him to put the well-being of another person ahead of himself and to understand how Rosabella’s mistake with Joe was the consequence of Tony’s own error when he sent Rosabella Joe’s picture rather than his own. As part of this metamorphosis Tony finally stands up to his sister. When Marie once again points out his age, physical unattractiveness, and lack of intelligence, the formerly vulnerable Tony responds to the final insult in this litany in underscored speech: “No! In da head omma no smart, ma, in da heart, Marie. In da heart!”52
Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, smart in the head as well as in the heart, has managed to entertain and move audiences as much as nearly any musical that aspires to operatic realms (Loesser’s denials notwithstanding). Although it lacks the dazzling and witty dialogue, lyrics, and songs of its more popular—and stylistically more homogeneous—Broadway predecessor Guys and Dolls, Loesser’s musical story of Tony and his Rosabella offers what Burrows described as “a gentle something that wanted to ‘make them cry.’”53The Most Happy Fella makes us cry.
Four years later Loesser himself was crying over the failure (ninety-seven performances) of the bucolic Greenwillow (1960). The show contained an excellent score, the best efforts of Tony Perkins in the leading role, and a positive review by Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. Despite all this, Donald Malcolm would ridicule the show’s tone in the New Yorker when he wrote that the village of Greenwillow “makes Glocca Morra look like a teeming slum” and a village where “Brigadoon could be the Latin Quarter.”54
The following year Loesser, again with Guys and Dolls librettist Burrows, succeeded in a more traditional urban musical comedy, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961). Unlike Tony in The Most Happy Fella, whose vulnerability and humanity, if not age, appearance, and intelligence, distinguishes him from other Broadway protagonists, the hero of Loesser’s next (and last) Broadway hit, J. Pierrepont Finch, is a boyish and aggressively charming Machiave
lli who sings the show’s central love song to himself as he shaves before a mirror in the executive washroom (“I Believe in You”).
As its well-received 1995 Broadway revival starring Matthew Broderick further demonstrated, How to Succeed deserves recognition as one of the truly great satirical shows. In how many musicals can we laugh so uproariously about nepotism, blackmail, false pretenses, selfishness, and the worship of money, among many other human foibles. One example of Loesser’s comic originality and imagination in song is “Been a Long Day.” In this number, which might be described as a trio for narrator and twin soliloquies, a budding elevator romance is described in blow-by-blow detail through a third party before the future lovebirds manage to express their privately sung thoughts directly.
For his remaining eight years Loesser was unable to bring a work to Broadway. Pleasures and Palaces, a show about Catherine the Great, closed out of town in 1965, and Loesser died before he could fully complete and begin to try out Señor Discretion. But Loesser’s legacy remains large, and in his thirteen years on the Broadway stage he fared far better than Runyon’s 6–5 odds against. As Loesser’s revivals have shown, Broadway audiences, collapsing under the weight of musical spectacles, are reveling in the musicals of Loesser, the composer-lyricist who continues to give audiences and even musical and theater historians and critics so much to laugh (and cry) about and so little to sneeze at.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MY FAIR LADY
From Pygmalion to Cinderella
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 33
