The happiest fellow in the whole Napa valley (according to Frank Loesser, after Sidney Howard’s “They Knew What They Wanted”) is Tony Esposito, the gruff but kindly vintner whose postal courtship of a young waitress who once served him in a San Francisco greasy spoon has met with success. The young woman—he calls her Rosabella, for reasons that will be apparent to any student lyricist—has consented to marry him. She has suggested that they exchange photographs and has sent one of herself. Instead of sending his own picture, Tony cravenly sends a photograph of his handsome young foreman, Joe. Although Joe has indicated a readiness to move on, on the day of the wedding he is still around and planning to stay for the festivities. Tony, setting out late to fetch Rosabella, whose real name is Amy, misses her at the station and has a bad crackup coming home. He is being carried in, broken and bloody, just as Amy, to whom everything has become clear, is about to stalk offstage, suitcase in hand. “You’re leaving him now?” everyone says. “How can you be so cruel? Aw, go on—marry him!” So she does, and the first-act curtain falls on Joe comforting Amy and the two moving into an ominously steamy embrace.
“The Most Happy Fella” is a musical that is perhaps best seen as an older person’s show. It has the plot of “Fanny”—young woman slips with young man and marries older man whom she learns to care for—divorced from any notion of romantic love. But if you turn the relationship between the young people in “Fanny” into a virtually passionless one-night stand (what my generation used to call “a charity fuck”), what you have is a story about a young woman who is forced to content herself with some old duffer just because some other old duffer wanted to teach everybody a lesson about making do with what life has to offer.
It seems to me that life itself does a swell job of teaching us to make do without our needing musical theatre to drive the point home. Also, I think that “Most Happy Fella” overreaches itself, groping after some notion of Seriousness or Art. Loesser at his best (“Guys and Dolls” and “How to Succeed in Business”) had a gift for balancing cynicism with romance in a way that kept both firmly moored to a specific time and context. If “Guys and Dolls” is great, it’s because it effects a perfect marriage between fifties realism and fifties idealism. Gambling man, civilizing woman: the one starts out cynical, the other hopelessly romantic. What makes the show such fun is our discovery that the gambler is the ultimate romantic and the woman with domestic longings the ultimate realist. “The Most Happy Fella” isn’t fun. It’s pseudo opera superimposed on pseudo Americana.
Gerald Gutierrez’s Goodspeed Opera revival, which opened at the Booth Theatre last Thursday, is pretty much what it was at the Goodspeed Opera last summer, but then I never understood the fuss about the production. It seemed to me your basic better-than-average dinner theatre revival—no worse, perhaps, than the Paper Mill Playhouse revival of “Show Boat” a couple of seasons ago, but certainly no better. In fact, I remember being a little shocked by the amateurishness of the whole enterprise—perhaps because the production had been so highly praised. Many of the leads seemed to be weak singers, and Charles Pistone, the actor playing Joe, needed posture work and a diction coach. The woman playing Amy’s friend Cleo (Liz Larsen) could sing, all right—and boy she wasn’t going to let you forget it!—while the members of the ensemble were doing the kind of mugging and not very skillful show dancing you expect to see only in summer stock.
Supposedly, one of the production’s great selling points was that Mr. Gutierrez used a version of Loesser’s score calling for only two pianos. I thought the result sounded tinny. On Broadway, where ticket prices make the absence of a full orchestra an absurdity, the production has the feel of one of those City Opera musical-comedy revivals where the words and the score are all there but something seems to have gone wrong aesthetically. Some of the performances have improved (like Sophie Hayden’s and Spiro Malas’s), and some have not. Mr. Pistone still walks around with his head jutting forward, and he pronounces “Joey” so that in his signature song it sounds as if the wind is calling, “Time to go, Jew.” Miss Larsen still sings in that brassy show-biz style for which in the 1990s there is no reason or excuse. (It went out in the seventies.) Liza Gennaro’s choreography, which is nothing if not hokey, doesn’t look any better on Broadway than it did in East Haddam, and Jess Goldstein’s costumes are looking a little worse. The principals’ dresses were always a bit Bolton’s-esque, but fashion would seem to have caught up with the men, whose liberally flowered shirts look distractingly like a new line of tailor-mades that the Gap is showing just now.
I don’t remember whom I first saw as Herman, the too-nice Texan who has to learn to make a fist and a frown, but it wasn’t Scott Waara, who plays the role here. Mr. Waara is never a chore to watch, but the best things about the production are James McMullan’s poster art and the three Italian chefs (Mark Lotito, Buddy Crutchfield, and Bill Nabel), who vie with one another in officiousness. The night I attended, the people in the audience seemed to be working pretty hard at enjoying themselves. During that last scene at the railway station, though—when Joe has left for New Mexico, and Tony has stopped being all bent out of shape about the baby, and it’s begun to dawn on you how banal all this is, and that if diversion was what you’d wanted you could have stayed home and rented a movie, while if culture was what you’d wanted you could have gone to the Met—they seemed to me to be getting a little fractious.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, February 24, 1992