While not all of Loesser’s musical-comedizing is artistically disappointing, everything in Fella that is disappointing is musical-comedizing. Amy (now Rosabella) is less of a survivor and more of a gusher in the usual ingénue mold. Cleo and Herman are sprung straight from the brow of a vaudeville hayseed act and will not live happily ever after—or in any other way—anywhere but in Musical Comedy Fantasy Land. The postman and the doctor are assigned creepy/cutesy action ariettas, mercifully brief but no less objectionable on that account. While the chorus is given much that is musically and theatrically effective, it doesn’t have a dramatic function, for the intertwining of the love story with the communal life around it that is so important in Street Scene and Porgy and Bess proves of little significance here.

On the plus side is the invention of Tony’s sister, Marie, who does serve a dramatic purpose, and who forcefully represents the guilt-ridden matriarchal dominance Tony must face down to become a happy fella. This role’s stature is much enhanced by the inclusion of Eyes Like a Stranger, a somber but well-written song cut from the original production and recording and excluded from the score, but restored in the 1979 Broadway revival. Like many a composer before him, Loesser was able to compensate in large measure for librettistic weaknesses with his music. When Rosabella gushes, she does so prettily and touchingly, in Somebody, Somewhere and Warm All Over. Joe lives vividly in his haunting drifter’s credo, Joey, and the heart-melting Don’t Cry. The chorus may remain little more than updated operetta merry villagers, but they get to sing the lusty unison Fresno Beauties, not to mention Sposalizio and Big D, which are unsurpassed among musical-comedy production numbers. You want to hate the impossibly genial Herman, but you really can’t when he leads the score’s one jukebox hit, Standing on the Corner, joins Cleo in launching Big D, or asserts his dweebiness with I Like Ev’rybody.

But these passages, fine as they are, are not what carry Fella into the realm of music drama. Credit for that must go first to the welding of Loesser’s complex and at times strikingly adventurous harmonic language with Walker’s extraordinary orchestrations. Between them, these elements create a texture that sometimes attains a genuine profundity, and that inhabits a world far beyond that of even quite accomplished Broadway pit writing. The scoring for brass, which on Broadway usually ranges from the perkily rude to the downright nerve-wracking, here extends to writing for the horns that suggests the very best Hollywood broad-is-our-land sort (Ferde Grofé on Napa red)—listen to their hymnlike announcement of Tony’s I Don’ Know Notin’ About Her in the maestoso of the overture. Or turn to the very end of Act 1 (Joe’s seduction of Rosabella), where horns and trombone combine with the strings in a harmonically spiky passage of glissandos and sforzandos that are as sexually explicit as the Rosenkavalier prelude, yet emotionally ambivalent (conveying both the pull and the resistance) and unmistakably American.

It is the entire sequence from Rosabella’s arrival to the end of Act 1 that first shows Loesser to be a true dramatic composer, as opposed to a talented Broadway songsmith. This is a 28-page stretch that could well be a hopeless mishmash. It embraces straight dialogue, underscored dialogue (which has proved treacherous to American works as disparate as Show Boat, The Devil and Daniel Webster, and Regina), accompanied recitative, arioso, song and duet—all in continuous, highly charged dramatic action. Loesser moves with astonishing smoothness through this progression, partly with the shrewd use of ear-leading motivic devices. One of these begins life modestly, as a “safety”—an ostinatolike piece of underscoring that vamps for as long as it takes to play out a passage of dialogue or pantomime. It’s briefly introduced at the moment Joe and Rosabella spot each other, and it couldn’t be simpler—two bars of strings in three, then four voices in open octaves, crawling up and down at odd intervals. It reappears at a higher pitch and with its second bar more restlessly set, a second or two after Joe has made clear to Rosabella the truth about the picture and a second or two before the injured Tony is brought onstage, as the neighbors arrive to greet Rosabella—a truly Verdian bit of dramaturgy. Then, with the full horror of Rosabella’s predicament in sharp focus, it takes on still shiftier form and becomes the agitated accompaniment to her No Home, No Job arioso, with flute, celesta, English horn and bassoon lending mournful colors.