The Most Happy Fella

National Review, May 25, 1992 by Joseph Sobran

BROADWAY is teeming with revivals this year, three of them Frank Loesser musicals: The Most Happy Fella, Guys and Dolls, and the imminent How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. The first two are already smash hits, and they deserve to be. But their success is a sign of something more than their merits, or even Loesser's magic.

Fella is Loesser's 1956 attempt at an American transposition of Italian opera; most of its dialogue is sung, not spoken. The hero is an Italian immigrant and Napa Valley grape farmer, Tony Esposito, whose mail-order bride becomes pregnant by another man-- on their wedding night, no less. We have the makings of a Verdi stablest here, but Tony is less an Italian than the lovable stereotype thereof, so the tone falls between sweet and bittersweet (but nearer to sweet).

Tony is an aging, balding, hulking man who has sent his prospective young bride a picture of one of his handsome young farm hands, Joe, so as not to scare her off. When she arrives, she meets Joe and naturally mistakes him for Tony; and when Tony is badly injured shortly after the error is corrected, she falls into the to an age of levity and surface polish, which means civility, which means maturity. Grownups didn't use to think their problems were necessarily of urgent interest to everyone else; and entertainers didn't use to think they weren't doing their job unless they bared body and soul, during and after working hours. They knew the serious side of life, including sex, as well as this generation does, but they also knew how to deal with it allusively and with delicately risque wit, instead of dragging it into full view on each and every occasion. They trusted other grownups to get their drift, and respected them enough not to suppose meaning could be conveyed only by the gruesome, tiresome explicitness of obscenity and psychobabble.

The Most Happy Fella and Guys and Dolls are both knowing about sex, but they count on a knowing audience that doesn't need lessons about life. If Frank Loesser was an alcoholic or a victim of child abuse, that was his business. His deal with the audience was to amuse, that's all; and it was enough. His kind of entertainment was the art of a jaunty civility--very New York, in the truly good old days-- in which people kept a certain friendly distance that didn't preclude the fellowship of humor and other warm emotions. Being cheerful was a social duty, trust was established by good manners, and nobody thought Fred Astaire and Nat King Cole were shallow phonies for smiling at the public.

You can overdo good humor, but by now we've been overdoing its opposite long enough. "Authenticity" has become a schtick. It's not adolescence we look back on with nostalgia these days; it's adulthood. Maybe the current Broadway revivals are a sign that adulthood is making a comeback. And not a moment too soon.