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

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 rudimentary 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