Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

This Moment On” (later interpolated by Ann Miller in the 1953 film version of Kiss Me, Kate discussed in chapter 14). After Out of This World, Porter created two successful Broadway shows, Can-Can (1953) and Silk Stockings (1955). He would complete his illustrious career with two film musicals, High Society in 1956 (which included “True Love,” introduced by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in her final Hollywood role) and Les Girls in 1957. The next year, Porter’s last eight songs appeared in the television production Aladdin (scripted by One Touch of Venus librettist S. J. Perelman). His creative spirit broken after the deaths of his mother and his wife and the amputation of a leg (he had already suffered more than thirty operations since 1937 when a horse he was riding crushed both his legs), Porter spent the remaining years before his own death in 1964 in self-imposed isolation.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GUYS AND DOLLS AND THE MOST HAPPY FELLA

The Greater Loesser

For once nostalgia rings true. As Broadway and London revivals so frequently remind us, the 1950s were truly a glorious decade for the American musical. Following in their own luminous footsteps of the 1940s (Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific), Rodgers and Hammerstein continued to present their felicitous dramatic integrations of happy talk and happy tunes (and serious dramatic subjects) when they opened the new decade with their unprecedented fourth major hit musical, The King and I (1951), and closed it with a final hit collaboration, The Sound of Music (1959). In 1956, Lerner and Loewe presented My Fair Lady, a universally praised musical that eventually eclipsed Oklahoma! as the longest running Broadway musical. One year later the Laurents-Sondheim-Bernstein trilogy brought to Broadway West Side Story. The decade introduced many critical and popular successes, musicals like Wonderful Town (lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Bernstein), Kismet (music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest with more than a little help from the nineteenth-century Russian composer Alexander Borodin), Pajama Game and Damn Yankees (music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross), The Music Man (music, lyrics, and book by Meredith Willson), Fiorello! (lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, music by Jerry Bock), and Gypsy (book by Laurents, lyrics by Sondheim, and music by Jule Styne); two of these by Frank Loesser, that have become classics—Guys and Dolls (1950) and The Most Happy Fella (1956)—were the toast of Broadway in the 1990s and Guys and Dolls returned yet again to Broadway in 2009.

Even those who love to hate Broadway musicals make an exception for Guys and Dolls and consider this show one of the most entertaining and perfect ever. Although Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and perhaps Bernstein’s Candide would later overshadow Loesser’s next show in popularity or critical approbation, The Most Happy Fella continues to boast the longest initial run, 678 performances, of any Broadway work prior to the 1980s that might claim an operatic rubric. As a tribute to its anticipated appeal as well as its abundance of music, its cast album was the first to be recorded in a nearly complete state, on three long-playing records.

In contrast to the instant and sustained appeal and unwavering stature of Guys and Dolls, however, the popularity and stature of The Most Happy Fella has evolved more slowly and less completely. In one prominent sign of its growing popularity and acclaim in the United States, the 1990–1991 Broadway season marked the appearance (with generally positive critical press) of two new productions, one with the New York City Opera and one on Broadway.1 Despite lingering controversy regarding its ultimate worth, The Most Happy Fella is clearly gaining in both popular acclaim and critical stature and is even receiving some serious scholarly attention.2

Like fellow composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim two decades later, Loesser (1910–1969) gained initial distinction as a lyricist.3 Unlike Sondheim, who had been writing music to complement his lyrics since his teens, only after a decade of professional lyric-writing could Loesser be persuaded to compose his own music professionally. He scored a bull’s eye on his very first try, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” (1942), one of the most popular songs of World War II. Earlier he wrote his first published song lyrics, “In Love with the Memory of You” (1931), to music composed by William Schuman, the distinguished classical composer and future president of the Juilliard School and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In an unusual coincidence Loesser made his Broadway debut (as a lyricist) for the same ill-fated revue, The Illustrator’s Show (1936), that marked the equally inauspicious Broadway debut of Frederick Loewe, twenty years before My Fair Lady and The Most Happy Fella.

Loesser began a decade of film work more successfully the next year with his song, “The Moon of Manakoora.” Film collaborations with major Hollywood songwriters would soon produce lyrics to the Hoagy Carmichael chestnuts, “Heart and Soul” and “Two Sleepy People” (both in 1938), and song hits with Burton Lane and Jule Styne who, like Loesser, would soon be creating hit musicals on Broadway beginning in the late 1940s.4 After “Praise the Lord,” Loesser, a composer-lyricist in the tradition of Berlin and Porter, would go on to compose other World War II popular classics, including “What Do You Do in the Infantry” (in “regulation Army tempo”) and the poignant “Rodger Young,” and later a string of successful film songs that culminated in the Academy Award–winning “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” featured in Neptune’s Daughter (1947).

Frank Loesser. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

Clearly, by the late 1940s Loesser was ready for Broadway. Drawing on the star status of Ray Bolger and the experience of George Abbott (the writer-director of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes, also starring Bolger, and the director of Pal Joey), fledgling producers Ernest Martin and Cy Feuer were prepared to take a calculated risk on Loesser’s music and lyrics with Abbott’s adaptation of Brandon