Word: loessers
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Without the American musical theater there might not be any American theater. Except for a very occasional O'Neill or Williams, the great writers of the U.S. stage have not been playwrights but composers and lyricists: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, to name but a few. Beginning with the first modern musical, Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat (1927), these writers have created a durable and increasingly versatile native art form. Broadway musicals at their best fuse music, dance, drama and plain old show...
Happily, it still does. The Kirkland House Drama Society's current production of Frank Loesser's How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, an early-'60s paean to the knucklehead glory of girl-watching and "getting ahead," recreates the innocence of that time with an enjoyable, if sometimes unfocused, energy. Moving through the standard '60s-musical formula of boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-fall-in-love, boy-and-girl-fall-out-of-love, and boy-beats-world-and-marries-girl -- all to the accompaniment of Loesser's slick score -- the Kirkland House cast manages to create...
...part of Bud Frump--the boss's maddeningly wimpish nephew--not only an impressive comic flair, but also the best singing voice in the cast. O'Brien's clear, powerful solos in "Coffee Break" and "Gotta Stop That Man," the two best-staged production numbers, do full justice to Loesser's music...
...groups sooner or later--and Guys and Dolls is, without question, one of them. Many of us have already been acquainted with the marvelously larger-than-life, Runyonesque characters in the form of Sky Masterson, Nathan Detroit, or the inimitable Nicely-Nicely Johnson. Thus, the success in presenting Frank Loesser's musical depends, for better or for worse, on the degree to which the performers can live up to a firmly established level of caricature. In this respect, the opening-night Leverett House audience was not disappointed...
...Dolls. A Damon Runyon character once bet 5 to 1 for the underdog "Harvards" over the "Yales" in the New London crew races because he figured nothing in life had odds much better than 5 to 4. The irresistable folk of Runyon's Manhattan underworld gang-up with Frank Loesser's superb songs to make this a musical offer no audience could refuse...