Adult entertainment

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 arms of Joe. But she marries Tony, and learns to love him before realizing that she's carrying Joe's child. She withholds this explosive secret from Tony as long as she can, but finally has to tell him.

This production has diverse delights, but it's notable mostly for two things. One is Spiro Malas's endearing and beautifully sung Tony. An operatic bass-baritone, Malas can boom infectiously or hold a soft note so quietly that the audience stops breathing until he cuts it off. He infallibly gets laughs, always in such a way as to increase your sympathy for Tony. He makes the stereotype live.

What also stands out, alas, is the two-piano accompaniment that has replaced the orchestra in this production. Loesser himself authorized and supervised the arrangement before he died, so that Fella could be mounted by companies who couldn't afford the full treatment. But on Broadway, at $55 a ticket? The loud percussion sometimes drowns out the singing and constantly makes the production sound cheaper than the seats.

Guys and Dolls, which dates from 1950, is one of the very greatest musical comedies, and with the brisk direction of Jerry Zaks and the thrilling choreography of Christopher Chadman, it gets the production it deserves. The sets and costumes are nicely-nicely stylized, with colors that start at blazing yellow and flashy turquoise, proceeding to the truly loud. The cartoonish quaintness suits the story perfectly. The wit ain't subtle, but it's terrific. Your eyes are laughing before you hear a line sung or spoken.

The 1955 movie, with Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson and Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit, was drab and leaden. Maybe it was nobody's fault; the Damon Runyon characters aren't meant to be seen in close-up. Intimacy wrongs these caricatures; smaller-than-life figures become grotesque in CinemaScope. The rakish dual love story of two gamblers and their dolls works best as a series of light skits on the stage, where sheer space prevents anything from getting out of proportion and a broad performance, like Vivian Blaine's immortal Adelaide, "the well-known fiancee," doesn't overwhelm the audience with its comic excess.

The new production belongs to Faith Prince, who gives Miss Blaine a run for her immortality. She nearly stops the show every time she shows up.

The peak, inevitably, is "Adelaide's Lament," her squeaky, sniffling recital of psychosomatic ailments induced by

Nathan's 14-year procrastination at the altar. I've never seen a performer with greater comic command of the stage-and this would be a splendid show even without her. Every song still scores, no matter what sentiment it aims at.

Why this burst of revivals--not only of Loesser, but of Gershwin, Porter, Coward, Meredith Willson, and other Broadway classics? I think it's a happy symptom of a craving for adult entertainment, in an age when that phrase has perversely come to mean adolescent prurience.

Henry Allen of the Washington Post has recently written that we are awash in adolescent morbidity these days: "television freak shows," nonstop intensity, celebrity confessions, political fanaticisms, who-asked-you self-revelations, professional victimhood, activist disruptions, violent bad manners, and general ghastly seriousness all marks of a pervasive self-absorption and self-importance that require us to endure unsolicited intimacy with a lot of boring people who think their problems and obsessions should take precedence over our right to go about our own business and enjoy our privacy.

The musical comedy, on the other hand, is the fine fruit of a special American style of urbanity. It belongs 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.