By 1950, Frank Loesser had written many fine songs and two hit shows, Where’s Charley? and Guys and Dolls. The latter is a virtually perfect pure musical. In it, a mastery of the musical comedy craft is brought to bear, every number is inspired, and the score fits lock-and-key with its Damon Runyon sources. For his next project, Loesser reached back to the 1924 Pulitzer Prize drama, Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. As was his custom, he acted as his own librettist and lyricist. Normally a quick worker, he toiled for four years on The Most Happy Fella.

Howard’s play has much in common with Elmer Rice’s Street Scene and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy. These three plays, whose musicalizations arrived at intervals of roughly a decade, were themselves much closer siblings, born within a span of just over four years. All three belong to the realist movement in American theatre. All three have a strong ethnic-proletarian flavor. And all three are Romantic: in each, a man and a woman, not fully participant in the community and overwhelmed by loneliness, try desperately to find a life together. They Knew What They Wanted is set in the California wine-country home of Tony Patucci, a simple, open-hearted sort from Palermo. In his ’50s and prosperous, he has fallen for Amy, a waitress he’s spotted in a San Francisco restaurant called “Il Trovatore.” They’ve had a correspondence, and Tony has finally proposed to Amy. He has sent her a picture but, afraid of rejection, has made it a picture of his foreman, the young and studly Joe. The play’s action relates Amy’s arrival for the wedding; Tony’s injury when he overturns his truck while nervously rushing to meet her at the station; Amy’s discovery of the photo deception and her confused, lonely one-night stand with Joe; Amy’s tending of Tony during his recuperation and the growth of their feeling for each other; the disclosure of Amy’s pregnancy by Joe, and finally Tony’s fight with himself to overcome his initial rage and shame, accept the baby as his and retain what he really wants, a life with Amy. Out around all this, there is considerable discussion of the social, political, and religious attitudes of the time and place among Joe, a local Irish priest, and Tony’s doctor.

Loesser treated the play boldly. He opened up the setting to include the vineyards, the barn, the train station and the San Francisco restaurant. He brought onstage crowds of farmhands and neighbors, unseen in the play. He created a comic second couple, Cleo and Herman, and an antagonist of sorts in Tony’s envious, clannish sister Marie. He replaced one Chinese cook with three Italian ones, who are a cross between the Marx Brothers and Puccini’s Ping, Pang, and Pong. And he wrote “a lotta music”—very nearly continuous music, in fact, though in thoroughly old-fashioned closed-number sections. Not everything  about the libretto is of purest gold. The role of Joe is much reduced in length and interest: the political edge to his restlessness is lost, leaving him as little more than an ethically heedless migrant Lothario. Also gone is nearly everything specific to the attitudes of the locale and era, and with it much of what helps the audience to understand Tony’s and Amy’s choices as acts of moral courage. The illegal nature of Tony’s business, and his innocently dismissive way of dealing with it, is tacitly let slide—he is in fact a Prohibition profiteer whose legal position is not so different from that of the Columbian Extraditables.