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

of adapting Howard’s play They Knew What They Wanted.27 Before long, however, he realized that he could delete “the topical stuff about the labor situation in the 1920’s, the discussion of religion, etc.”28 Loesser continues: “What was left seemed to me to be a very warm simple love story, happy ending and all, and dying to be sung and danced.”29Throughout his compositional work Loesser never lost sight of this central dramatic focus: the developing love and eventual fulfillment between the central protagonists, Tony and Rosabella.

Example 11.5. Two-part counterpoint in “I Like Ev’rybody”

In keeping with the generally warmer and fuzzier expectations of a Broadway musical, Loesser added Cleo, Rosabella’s partner in waitressing drudgery in San Francisco, who receives a sitting job in Tony’s Napa Valley to rest her tired waitressing feet. He also gives Cleo a partner not found in Howard’s play, Herman, the likable hired hand who will win Cleo when he learns to make a fist. Cleo and Herman, like their obvious prototypes, Ado Annie and Will Parker in Oklahoma!, serve their function faithfully (in contrast to Adelaide and the relatively unsung Nathan in Guys and Dolls). They also make admirable comic lightweights (albeit with sophisticated counterpoint) to contrast with the romantic heavyweights, Tony and Rosabella.

Gone from the musical are not only the lengthy discussions about religion, but even the character of Father McGee, the loquacious priest who opposes the marriage between Tony and Amy (in the play Tony is in love with Amy rather than Rosabella). In Howard’s play, Father McGee shows no apparent concern about their age differences, nor is he motivated by the jealousy that motivates his newly created counterpart in the musical, Marie, Tony’s younger sister. Howard’s Father McGee responds negatively to the marriage for religious reasons: Tony’s mail-order bride is not a Catholic.

Other differences between the musical and the somewhat darker play might be briefly noted. Howard has Tony seek a mate outside his Napa Valley Community because all the single women have slept with Joe, and he attributes Tony’s accident to drunkenness rather than fear of rejection. In the play, but not the musical, we learn that Tony’s fortune in the grape business stemmed from illegal earnings acquired during Prohibition. The play also contains a striking politically incorrect plot discrepancy. Only after the doctor tells Joe first that Amy (Rosabella) is pregnant does Joe tell Amy. In Howard’s play Joe offers to marry Amy and take her out of the Napa Valley; in Loesser’s adaptation Joe and Rosabella sing their private thoughts in the beginning of act II, but they never sing (or speak) directly after act I, and Joe leaves the community without knowing Rosabella’s condition.

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