Background and History
A friend of Loesser's recommended the Howard play They Knew What They Wanted as material for a musical in 1952. After he read it, he agreed it had musical potential, but decided to omit the political, labor, and religious material. It took him four years to complete the musical.
The Most Happy Fella frequently has been described as an opera, but some have qualified the term. In his book The World of Musical Comedy, Stanley Green noted that the musical is "one of the most ambitiously operatic works ever written for the Broadway theatre...Loesser said 'I may give the impression this show has operatic tendencies. If people feel that way - fine. Actually all it has is a great frequency of songs. It's a musical with music.' " In an article in the Playbill Magazine for the original Broadway production, Loesser wrote, "What was left seemed to me to be a very warm simple love story, happy ending and all, and dying to be sung and danced." Brooks Atkinson, theatre critic (The New York Times), called it a "music drama," noting Loesser "has now come about as close to opera as the rules of Broadway permit." Composer, conductor, and musical theatre teacher Lehman Engel and critic/author Howard Kissel called it a "fresh musical (perhaps opera)".
Read more about this topic: The Most Happy Fella
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