Word: loessers
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Guys and Dolls offers a nonpareil text and score, and a creative team so impressive that before the first preview, a year-long national tour starting in September had already been booked around the U.S. But the $5.5 million staging of composer-lyricist Frank Loesser's comic gem will be hard pressed to equal the emotional impact of his Most Happy Fella, telling of an inept but earnest quest for love by a hulking, homely immigrant farmer in California's Napa Valley. The book, also by Loesser, is intermittently burdened with the same irritating cuteness and insincerity that lumbers Crazy...
SHOW BUSINESS On today's musical stages, there's more of Loesser...
...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...
...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...