The Most Snappy Fella

By RICHARD CORLISS

What's playin' at the Opera?

I'll tell ya what's playin' at the Opera.

Musical by a Broadway kinda guy who wrote an operatic show that'd please everyone from Hedda Gabler to Hedda Hoppra.

That's what's playin' at the Opera.

If you see a guy whose star shines in the musical-comedy sky right now, you can bet it'll be Frank Loesser. Though the songwriter died in 1969, his work is enjoying a burgeoning revival. Last week Loesser's "musical with a lotta music," The Most Happy Fella (1956), opened to bravos and bouquets at the New York City Opera in Lincoln Center. A more intimate version of Fella will come to Broadway later this season, as will Loesser's damn-near-immortal Guys and Dolls (1950). This summer's straw-hat circuit was brightened by Where's Charley? (1948), starring Loesser's widow Jo Sullivan and their daughter Emily Loesser. The American Stage Festival mounted a reading of Greenwillow (1960), with an eye to a full staging next spring. Now if someone, please, will only pull How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961) out of mothballs -- and it's still as fresh as a Paris original -- all of Loesser's Broadway shows will be accounted for.

Loesser's output as a Hollywood songwriter, in the years before the composer-lyricist-librettist ganged up on Broadway, needs no revival. It already ornaments every TV late show. Loesser's catchy titles and skewed wit helped lodge many a song in the musical muscle memory of anyone who loves vintage pop: Heart and Soul and Two Sleepy People (music by Hoagy Carmichael), I Don't Want to Walk Without You (Jule Styne), Jingle Jangle Jingle (Joseph Lilley), Hoop-Dee-Doo (Milton DeLugg). And when Loesser began marrying his own music to his words, he hatched even more smashes: What Are You Doing New Year's Eve? On a Slow Boat to China and a few instant standards, including No Two People and Wonderful Copenhagen, for the 1952 movie Hans Christian Andersen.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving fella. Loesser would tell you that. As brash as any gravel-gargling high roller from Guys and Dolls, he was famous for telling his singers, "Loud is good," and he applied that maxim to his professional life. For Loesser, a song was melodrama in miniature: he loved the counterpoint of two hearts and voices in seductive competition, as in Baby, It's Cold Outside and many other contentious duets. They were an expression of his own tumultuous personality. During Guys and Dolls rehearsals, exasperated by Isabel Bigley's tentative attempts at I'll Know, Loesser stormed onstage and punched his leading lady in the nose. The show's Adelaide, Vivian Blaine, remembers him more fondly: "A lovable, raucous man with a deliciously evil laugh." Ever restless, he'd catch a few hours' sleep, start his composing (on a silent piano) at 4 a.m. and be ready for a martini at 8 a.m. "After all," says Sullivan, with whom Loesser fell in love when she sang the female lead in Most Happy Fella, "it was lunchtime for him."

Born into an erudite New York City family in 1910, Loesser for a while seemed the least likely to succeed. His father Henry was a respected piano teacher. After being widowed, his mother Julia translated and lectured on modern literature. His elder half brother Arthur was a pianist and musicologist who ultimately headed the piano department of the Cleveland Institute of Music. Friends of the family were surprised that Frank, not Arthur, achieved top musical renown; they affectionately called him the "evil of the two Loessers."

In 1931 he teamed with William Schuman -- later a distinguished classical composer and president of Lincoln Center -- to write songs and skits for vaudeville and radio performers. "He was an intellectual," Schuman recalls, "who'd go to the ends of the earth to hide that from anybody. Altogether brilliant." He moved on to Hollywood in 1937, fashioning bright novelties for comedy and dramatic actresses. Marlene Dietrich memorably mooed See What the - Boys in the Back Room Will Have, and Bette Davis croaked the wartime lament They're Either Too Young or Too Old. It was all 'prentice work for a man who would become one of Broadway's great sketch artists, whose songs could propel the story even as they stopped the show.

Loesser the Hollywood lyricist was Mr. Do-It-All. He wrote torchy stuff for gangster dramas and sarong songs for Dorothy Lamour. When collaborating, Loesser usually devised the lyric first, along with a "dummy tune" to suggest tempo and rhythm. Jimmy McHugh could compose a long, languid melodic line for Let's Get Lost because Loesser had compressed the intensity of new passion into the narrowest meter: "Let's defrost/ In a romantic mist./ Let's get crossed/ Off everybody's list."

World War II made Loesser a complete songwriter. Eager to contribute an anthem to the infantry, he wrote Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, and this time the dummy tune became the published song -- and a big hit. When he returned to movies, writing pile-driving boogie-woogie (Rumble Rumble Rumble) and patter songs (Can't Stop Talking) for hyperactive Betty Hutton, he had the credit he wanted: songs by Frank Loesser.

Too many songs, George S. Kaufman thought. "Good God," muttered the director of Guys and Dolls during the volatile rehearsals, "do we have to do every number this son of a bitch ever wrote?" You bet, when every number is a small ruby; the first act alone comprises its own Top 10 eternal hit parade. The ballads If I Were a Bell and I've Never Been in Love Before and the up- tempo Fugue for Tinhorns and A Bushel and a Peck distinguish any musical. But the savor of Guys and Dolls is in Loesser's capturing of the Damon Runyon Broadway wit, and by extension the unique pizazz of big-town America. No one had put a medical dictionary to music and turned it into a declaration of psychosomatic desperation, as in the nonpareil Adelaide's Lament. Nobody ever heard a love plaint like Nathan Detroit's: "All right already, I'm just a nogoodnik./ All right already, it's true. So nu?/ So sue me, sue me, what can you do me?/ I love you."

In the nearly unprecedented role of composer, lyricist and librettist for a Broadway show, Loesser adapted Sidney Howard's 1924 play They Knew What They Wanted, the story of a naive Italian-American grape grower who tricks a pretty waitress into marriage. The result, after five years' work, was The Most Happy Fella, a rich and deeply felt pastiche of popular and operatic vocabularies. If none of its 40-plus songs have quite the lasting power of Guys and Dolls' tunes, the show has an emotive force rare on Broadway; the feeling is big enough to fill an opera stage.

After Greenwillow, a daring flop, and How to Succeed, his longest-running hit, Loesser worked on two more shows: Pleasures and Palaces, which closed in Detroit, and Senor Discretion, for which he had composed drafts of all the songs. This workaholic was a smokeaholic too; in his study, cigarette butts would pile up like a Watts Tower of spent nicotine. Loesser called them coffin nails, and he was right: he died of lung cancer at 59.

He left behind legacies that perhaps only Frank Loesser could turn into hit songs. Music, no matter what its pedigree, can be great music. A tempestuous composer can be a sweet guy -- a goodnik. Loud, of course, is good. And Loesser is more.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York