The Most Happy Fella

The Most Happy Fella: Mark Lowry review

‘The Most Happy Fella’ brings out all the emotions

IRVING — Something magical happened last Saturday night at the Irving Arts Center. After Lyric Stage’s production of Frank Loesser’s 1956 work The Most Happy Fella, the first show in its 20th season, his widow, Jo Sullivan Loesser, who had been in the audience, was brought onstage to sing a song.

Before doing that, she gave lengthy hugs to the main players, especially Amber Nicole Guest, who played Rosabella, the part that Jo Sullivan Loesser originated.

Emotions were high. Loesser proclaimed it one of the best productions of the work she had seen, and then sang one of her late husband’s Hollywood songs, Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year. Tears flowed in the audience and onstage, but honestly, they hadn’t stopped since the three-hour show’s ending.

It was that good.

Lyric Stage keeps raising its own bar, and while it’s hard to beat the group’s most recent triumph — a production of Oklahoma! that was as definitive as you’ll ever see — the rarer Fella comes awfully close.

When Fella debuted on Broadway, the producers went out of their way not to label it “opera,” because operas didn’t fare as well there. Fella is decidedly more opera, but happily straddles the fence between the two art forms.

That’s one of the reasons it’s not performed much, and when it is, it’s as much by opera companies as by musical theaters. Working from Don Walker’s original orchestrations, Lyric musical director Jay Dias has reconstructed the score for a 38-piece orchestra, and under his baton, the overture and prelude to Act II sound marvelous. His ability to connect with the performers onstage is one of many reasons Lyric’s productions outshine the others.

Most Happy Fella is a mammoth show, and director Cheryl Denson and choreographer Len Pfluger pace it like an earthy cabernet being savored with a delectable dessert.

But of course, it all hinges on casting. As Tony, baritone and Broadway vet Bill Nolte is physically perfect for the role of an Italian-American vineyard owner who is so desperate for love that he pays waitress Rosabella to be his wife, and is constantly harped on by his sister Marie (Jodi C. Wright) for never being good — or good-looking — enough.

Much of the material Dias has added back into the show is for Marie, and Wright sings it gloriously, making you feel sorry for the audiences that have never heard Nobody’s Ever Gonna Love You.

As two Texans who bump into each other and give us a more traditional love story, Herman (Alex Organ) and Cleo (Catherine Carpenter Cox) are a hoot, and hold their own with the vocal material. And the chorus sounds as good as you’re likely to hear on an opera stage.

And then there’s Guest, a local performer who makes a breakthrough with a starring role in a professional company. She more than hits the notes in a demanding vocal role; the character’s sense of sadness changes from hopeful in the early song Somebody, Somewhere to that of a changed woman in Please Let Me Tell You in the third act. Rosabella and Tony will each never have the bubbly personality of a Herman-type, but together in true love, it’s a new kind of happily ever after.

When a show called The Most Happy Fella has you bawling by the end, all involved have done the work proud.

The Most Happy Fella: Alexandra Bonifield review

Vintage Perfection: Lyric Stage & The Most Happy Fella

A most happy audience files out of Carpenter Hall at Irving Arts Center, after experiencing the visually resplendent, musically rich performance of Frank Loesser’s genre-defying “The Most Happy Fella”, under the auspices of the Dallas-Fort Worth region’s champion of musical theatre classics, Lyric Stage. Once again, Jay Dias conducts from a unique, fully orchestrated score, inspiring and enhancing the production’s soaring dynamic at operatic scale, directed by Cheryl Denson with choreography and musical staging by Len Pfluger. In a September brimming over with worthy productions, choose this one now if you love superbly staged musicals. It closes its run this coming Sunday, September 16.

Is it a musical, or is it an opera? Its demanding songs, a full three acts’ worth, certainly require range, depth and vocal skill beyond the reach of the average musical theatre performer. Opening in May 1956, at the Imperial Theatre, “The Most Happy Fella” transferred to The Broadway Theatre in October 1957, where it ran 676 performances. In his May 4, 1956 New York Times review, celebrated theatre critic Brooks Atkinson commented that composer/lyricist Loesser “has now come about as close to opera as the rules of Broadway permit.” Sung in English, it’s a readily accessible human interest and love story, a prime early example of an entertainment with music that also deals with serious social issues.

Lyric Stage’s production gets right to the heart of the piece, bringing its audience directly into the lives of everyday working people in northern California in the 1920’s with its humorous opening number “Ooh! My Feet”, sung with expressive ennui and bell-clear voice by Catherine Carpenter Cox as Cleo the waitress, the show’s comic relief lead and the romantic lead’s wisecracking sidekick.

Amber Nicole Guest as romantic lead Rosabella immediately follows, revealing her character’s heart’s desire with angelic lyricism and an amazing vocal range, delivering the complex “Somebody, Somewhere” as easily as a nursery song. Hard to tell if the audience is more in love or in awe of her. One by one the leads enter, each enlivening the difficult, elaborate score with comprehensive vocal talent and superior acting chops. Audience appreciation mounts to an almost audible hum: basking in the dark, sultry glow of Doug Carpenter as vineyard foreman Joe; eating up the sunny charm and wacky antics of Alex Organ as Cleo’s sweet, ingenuous boyfriend Herman; or shedding a tear in amazement at the boundless expressive capacity and engaging warmth of longtime professional Bill Nolte, who as Tony carries the full emotional arc of the play’s plot on confident, creative shoulders.

With a chorus that never blunders a dance step or sings a false note, Denson, Dias and Pfluger’s direction styles blend smoothly to evoke the simpler, sleepier world of a 1920’s Napa Valley vineyard, while keeping the production sharply defined for today’s audience tastes. Minor to the story arc but of particularly charismatic theatricality and adored by the audience is the trio of Italian chefs, Giuseppe, Ciccio and Pasquale. Expertly harmonized and danced by Max Swarner, Martin Antonio Guerra and Tyler Donahue, this trio adds festive “brio” to the production. Scenic design by Michael Anania (originally created for New York City Opera’s 2006 production) conveys the lush, verdant feel of the Napa Valley, and Julie N. Simmons’ lighting design catches the perfect ethereal glow of the region. Costumed in contrasting bright or muted styles and hues for city and country-folk, Drenda Lewis’ costume design helps maintain the sweeping, pastoral sense of Frank Loesser’s most happy musical theatre work.

The Most Happy Fella: Elaine Liner review

My Oh Yes

“Big D” both song and city, is earning big laughs at Lyric and the Wyly.

It gives us pleasure to confess that Frank Loesser’s snappy show tune “Big D” (little-A, double-L-A-S) helps spell success for two productions that just opened in local theaters. The song is a by-god, knee-slapping showstopper as performed by Catherine Carpenter Cox and Alex Organ in the second act of Lyric Stage‘s glorious revival of the 1956 musical The Most Happy Fella. And it’s used as a post-intermission audience warmer-upper in Dallas Theater Center‘s brash and bawdy comedy revue, The Second City Does Dallas, at the Wyly.

My, oh, yes, it’s a great week for darlin’, darlin’ Dallas, where we’re in the high season of live theater, with more than 15 shows opening this month and plenty more after that.

Because it’s a short run (just one more weekend at Irving’s Carpenter Performance Hall), see The Most Happy Fella first. It’s a quaint old piece, but well worth dusting off and shining up. At Lyric, where they do only American musicals and only the way the composers intended them to be done, it’s been staged with love and wit by resident director Cheryl Denson, who also did Lyric’s monumental Oklahoma! this summer.

For this one, the orchestra pit at Carpenter Hall overflows with brass and strings, directed crisply by conductor Jay Dias. Choreographer Len Pfluger, who’s also in the show, combines waltz steps and square dancing for the sprawling dance numbers. The ensemble of more than 30 actors features some of the area’s best voices, with a couple of imports from NYC for leading roles.

One of those is Bill Nolte, a Broadway veteran (Cats, The Producers, La Cage) with a booming operatic baritone and droopy hound-dog eyes that could break your heart. He plays Tony, the middle-aged Napa Valley vineyard owner who falls for a lonely waitress (Amber Nicole Guest) whom he spies in a San Francisco café. Too shy to flirt but yearning for love, he leaves her a note and an amethyst tie pin, but she doesn’t remember what he looks like. When she answers his request for a letter and photo, he sends back a snapshot of his handsome young foreman, Joe (Doug Carpenter, another out-of-towner), who doesn’t know that his good-looking mug is being used to woo a pretty girl.

The plot twists like a grapevine when Rosabella arrives at the vineyard, ready to marry the man in the picture. Distraught, Tony drives his car off the road. Seeing his injuries, Rosabella agrees to a quick marriage ceremony, but then she spends the night with Joe. She gradually falls in love with Tony as she nurses him back to health. But her night with Joe will come back to haunt her.

Loesser wrote music, lyrics and libretto for Fella, clearly inspired by Italian opera and, perhaps, by a few too many soapy 1950s Douglas Sirk movies. But it’s a lovely show with a three-act score brightened by now-familiar treasures like “Standing on the Corner,” sung in close harmony by four cute galoots watching all the girls go by. (One of the guys is Organ, who earlier this summer was an outstanding Coriolanus for Shakespeare Dallas. Talk about versatile.) The lilting “Joey, Joey, Joey,” as pretty a dream song as you’ll find in any musical, is sung passionately by Carpenter. And “Big D,” a bring-down-the-house delight performed by Organ and Cox (playing Rosabella’s goofy waitress friend Cleo), has their characters discovering they’re both natives of the Lone Star State.

Against lush scenery used in the New York Opera production, Lyric Stage’s production offers a grand night of melodies, romantic encounters and comic interludes.

The Most Happy Fella: Lawson Taitte review

Lyric Stage makes ‘Most Happy Fella’ a most happy experience

IRVING — For many years, pretty much the only place you could see anything resembling the real The Most Happy Fella has been an opera house. Lyric Stage has reclaimed the piece for musical theater — triumphantly.

Between his lighthearted, populist hits Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the great Frank Loesser worked on his lyrical, big-hearted masterpiece about a middle-aged California winemaker, Tony, who falls in love with a young waitress and courts her through letters. The composer took advantage of Tony’s Italian immigrant background to write music that shared the lyrical impulse of Italian opera and folk music.

His producer, fearing that the operatic connection would hurt the show’s success on Broadway, persuaded Loesser to cut some of the glorious music. Much worse, in recent decades most theater companies have used only a couple of pianos, rather than a full orchestra, to play the rich score. Lyric Stage has remedied all that: Music director Jay Dias has restored Loesser’s original inspiration, corrected the orchestral parts, and conducts the full orchestra that otherwise only opera houses invest in these days.

Director Cheryl Denson has also cast The Most Happy Fella perfectly. Broadway veteran Bill Nolte sings the role of Tony with the beefy baritone it requires and balances the character’s surface irascibility with a deep humanity. Tony sends his young woman a picture of his younger foreman, Joe, in the fear that she’d find his true image too old and off-putting. Doug Carpenter combines a strong voice and athletic good looks in the part.

All the rest of the performers are locals. The biggest find is Amber Nicole Guest as the young beloved, whom Tony calls Rosabella. Until now, Guest has done well in smaller roles that gave no clue she possessed the splendid sound, pinpoint control and emotional vibrancy she brings to this difficult assignment. As Tony’s sister, Marie, Jodi C. Wright benefits the most from the musical restorations. It’s the most nearly operatic part aside from Tony’s, and Wright has the chops for it.

The show also boasts plenty of 1950s pop-style numbers, including two big hits, “Standing on the Corner” and one of particular local interest, “Big D.” They fall to Alex Organ as the amiable ranch-hand Herman and Catherine Carpenter Cox as Rosabella’s pal, Cleo. Organ, who won a critics’ award this week for Shakespeare and other drama, turns out to be the most charming of musical comedy performers as well. Cox matches him note for note and step for step. Together they’d steal the show — if all the rest of it weren’t so extraordinary.