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

Moss Hart. After his second consecutive Broadway success, Loesser was otherwise free to grow at his own pace and in his own way and to pursue his ambitious new Broadway show.

By the end of 1952 Loesser was simultaneously drafting sketches for his libretto, lyrics, and music in the first of sixteen sketchbooks of The Most Happy Fella. For more than the next three years he would work single-mindedly on his “musical with a lot of music” (calling it an opera would be the kiss of death).20 His only other major creative project during these years was the composition of three new songs for the film version of Guys and Dolls (1955), also produced by Goldwyn (discussed in chapter 14).21

In contrast to the sparse documentary evidence for the compositional process of Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella offers a cornucopia of dated and labeled material, all housed in the Music Division of the New York Public Library. These manuscripts shed some light on the embryonic mysteries and gestation of nearly every portion of the finished musical.22 The sketchbooks tell us that Loesser had begun most of the major songs (i.e., the twenty-one musical numbers in the published vocal score and libretto (indicated by small capital letters in the online website) before September 1954. Most of these numbers would require additional work during the next fifteen months. In a striking demonstration of creative economy, Loesser managed to use nearly every scrap of sketchbook material—more than one hundred entries—usually in the final score, but at least in the longer version that opened in Boston.

From the sketchbooks we learn that Loesser’s initial vision of the work allowed for even less spoken dialogue than the approximately fifteen minutes that would remain in the finished work. By far the most dramatically important material replaced by dialogue is the dramatic and climactic confrontation near the beginning of act III, when Rosabella tells Tony, the man she had come to love in act II, that she was willing to be seduced by his hired hand, Joe, at the end of act I. Relatively late in the compositional process (September and December 1955), in sketches marked “Angry Tony,” Loesser revealed that the dialogue of this scene initially contained powerful and dissonant underscoring.23

The sketches also show that Loesser’s titles for musical numbers, both large and small, were the generating force for the music to follow and that these titles generated rhythms (often indicated by X’s) before the rhythms led to melodies. Those who admire Loesser’s impeccable declamation of titles with strong profiles such as “The New Ashmolean Marching Society and Students’ Conservatory Band” in Where’s Charley? and “The Oldest Established” (the abbreviated title of “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York”) in Guys And Dolls can observe firsthand how the melody of a song such as “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance” evolved from sketches that share the rhythmic rather than the melodic profiles of the finished product.

Without the sketchbooks, the process by which Loesser expanded arioso passages into full-scale arias would go undetected, nor would we understand how simple sequential musical patterns served Loesser as essential starting points of so many of the songs in this show. The sketchbooks reveal the creative effort that went into such nuances as the important elongated emphasis on the word “full” in Tony and Rosabella’s big love duet, “My Heart Is So Full of You,” after numerous compositional digressions over a ten-month period. The sketchbooks also help to identify one of the striking unifying musical features in The Most Happy Fella: Loesser’s ubiquitous use of the melodic sequence, that is, short melodic phrases of symmetrical lengths repeated a step higher or lower. In Guys and Dolls, melodic sequences are noticeable in several songs, including the title song, “I’ll Know,” “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” “Take Back Your Mink,” and “Marry the Man Today”; in Fella, sequences appear even more prominently and in nearly every song. The first three phrases of “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance” (Example 11.4), for example, open with Rosabella’s thrice-ascending melodic sequence.

The Most Happy Fella, act I, scene 2. Jo Sullivan and Robert Weede (1956). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

Example 11.4. Melodic sequence and counterpoint in “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance”

Not surprisingly, the sketchbooks reveal something about the process by which Loesser worked out ways to combine melodies. What is seemingly less explicable is that Loesser took the trouble early in his compositional work to notate the familiar English round, “Hey Ho, Nobody Home” on a sketch entry labeled “Lovers in the Lane” (“Hi-ho lovers in the lane” is how Loesser’s text opens).24 In the duet portions of “How Beautiful the Days,” Tony and Rosabella alternate entrances of the same melody much as Charley and Amy shared their tune in “Make a Miracle” and the would-be lovers in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” When it came to “Abbondanza,” the trio in which Tony’s servants take stock of the wedding feast, Loesser could not decide whether he wanted exact melodic imitation in triple meter (3/4 time) or a freer melodic counterpoint in duple meter (2/4 time).25 Eventually he opted for the freer counterpoint and triple meter found in the published vocal score.

Loesser also included several songs that featured two simultaneous statements of independent but equally important melodies à la Berlin (non-imitative counterpoint). As “I Like Ev’rybody” for Herman and Cleo attests, Loesser did not reserve such contrapuntal complexity for his central romantic characters. When the song is introduced in act II, scene 4, Cleo starts it off with her tune. Then Herman sings the “main” tune against Cleo’s tune, now moved to the bass, where it was located in Loesser’s sketchbook.26 At the reprise of the song late in the show (act III, scene 1), the now-compatible Herman and Cleo simultaneously sing their compatible melodic lines (Example 11.5).

In a short essay printed in the Imperial Theatre playbill Loesser described his initial resistance to the idea