New Musical in Manhattan

The Most Happy Fella (based on Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted; book, lyrics and music by Frank Loesser) is Frank Loesser's first Broadway show since Guys and Dolls. In style more like an opera than a straight Broadway show, it achieves opera's invariable prime aim: its music stands splendidly foremost. In Broadway terms, The Most Happy Fella boasts an exuberantly rich and varied score that ranges from perky show tunes and bright snatches flung over the shoulder to full-throated romantic duets and choruses that flood the theater.

The score--for the rain-then-shine California romance of an aging Italian winegrower and the young waitress he has courted by mail--is at its best where it is lightest or most lightly lyrical. There is a male quartet cocking a very male eye in Standing on the Corner; there is the sheer Broadway frolicking of Big D, with its salute to Dallas; the gay lesson-in-English of Happy to Make Your Acquaintance; the Verdi-gurdy high spirits of Abbondanza and Sposalizio. But there is also the lyrical How Beautiful the Days, with its touch of Bellini-like sweetness, and the quick lilt of Young People (with its liltless follow-up line about the no-longer-young). Only in operatic passages that are datedly lush or flamboyantly melodramatic, or in the winegrower's inept vocalizings to his dead mother, does the generally vintage music turn to ordinary California, indeed even Hollywood, wine.

Fella is fortunate in having music that so often sweeps all before it, for there is a good deal that needs to be swept. The small human story with the wise human moral that Sidney Howard, in They Knew What They Wanted, neatly packed into one room has been wildly scattered and in places quite submerged all over the Napa Valley countryside. For all that is folkish in Fella, something plaintively simple is missing; as there is sentiment and to spare but no pervasive current of emotion. For in excess of any proper musical's quota, Fella has been choked up, and in places even hoked up with rustic razzle-dazzle and vineyard partygoing. All this might just get by were the parties more festive; but despite plenty of good dance music, Fella offers remarkably commonplace dancing.

And some of Loesser's lyrics, with their flat words and cliche rhymes, are not really suitable company for his music. Perhaps the only things that are suitable are Baritone Robert Weede in the title role, Susan Johnson in a comedy role, much of Joseph Anthony's lively staging and the best of Jo Mielziner's sets. But in working toward something more varied and spacious than the standard Broadway musical, Fella at its worst is a misstep forward; while the music itself is among Broadway's most resplendent in years.

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