There are a dozen more passages that transcend musical comedy custom. There is How Beautiful the Days, which begins as a standard duet of harmony and contentment (though an uncommonly lovely one), becomes a disturbed trio with the addition of Marie, and finally—after a striking harmonic signal—a darkly shaded quartet with Joe’s entrance. Or there is Song of a Summer Night, a charmingly worked piece of four-part glee-club writing with a blandishing high string accompaniment that serves as one of several valves by which Loesser releases the building tension of the final scenes. Devices, of course, are just that. They would be no more than points of an honest but dry sort of interest were it not for Loesser’s melodic genius. It is the composer’s ability to send his characters’ voices aloft in passionate, memorable song that will take hold of anyone approaching Fella for the first time. But while one can return to many musicals for a pleasant re-experience of their songs, Fella is one of the few to which return visits bring new discoveries and richer appreciation. It is one of the few that needs active listening, or at least the willingness to be led through the drama first and foremost by the powerful emotional logic of its music.
Like most worthwhile stage works, Fella poses major challenges in production. Its acting and singing requirements are well beyond the level of most “triple threat” performers. Dance can help Fella only a little and can damage it severely if misused. Only three numbers call for it, and even in those it is too closely tied to the dramatic life of the ensemble to allow for choreographic hubris. In the ’79 revival, the hip-flouncing waitresses of the opening scene, the soaring chorus boys in designer coveralls of Fresno Beauties, were fatal to credibility. Most of the music can be realized only by voices of truly operatic calibre. Tony needs a rich, ringing baritone of the Verdi-verismo type, with physical durability and rock-solid technique—the part is long. And he must be a real actor. Marie calls for a deep, strong contralto, Joe for a smooth, puissant bass-baritone with an easy top. Several of the character roles must have voices of cultivated range, strength, and quality. The female leads are, in a sense, even more problematic, for they are not as well set. Rosabella falls into the contradiction of most broadway ingénue writing: a clear, bright, lyric soprano is placed in a tessitura that is mezzo-soprano or even contralto. Here, the singer must fight the orchestra and low-voiced male partners who are in the strongest areas of their ranges, then try to create high-note epiphanies in the difficult upper-middle range. Cleo is an equally tough case: a belt voice that must hold its own against these same forces with what amounts to a high tenor line. Loesser makes valid expressive use of the sound, but it is a punishing usage.
Whether these problems can be met this season, and the work’s great musical and dramatic opportunities seized, remains to be seen. But at the least, Fella will return us to the time when the American musical stood at the edge of artistic greatness.”
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The advance promotion for Most Happy in Concert had announced that the songs would be performed by nine non-binary, female-identifying artists. While this was a clear provocation-cum-invitation of an increasingly common sort (provocative, at least, to anyone on friendly terms with the original Fella), it also seemed to hold out the possibility of hearing a trans-sexual voice or two cope with the music, and that held a measure of technical interest for me as a teacher. But: not that I can’t be fooled, but so far as I could determine by sound or sight, the seven performers (I was told that two understudies rounded the count up to the nine) were all biologically female from birth. They were of assorted physical sizes, shapes, ethnicities, and body languages, and dressed in everyday contemporary wear that signified indifference, or even defiance, as to how they might be perceived, particularly in a theatrical situation. In a previous iteration of Most Happy, they had truly sung the songs “in concert,” but here they were assigned choreographed movement that, after a seated, distant opening, kept them active in solo and small-group turns. These movements had no stylistic or idiomatic basis that I could discern, and while they often brought performers into proximity, they did not enable relationships. There was no empathetic contact among the female IDers—they merely handed off to one another as a new specimen of material came along. All in all, the attitude from stage to audience was of a kind that dared us to comment—nay, to allow that we had so much as taken note—and might have reactions or opinions of an aesthetic nature. Even when glittery long dresses were donned by some of the performers late in the show, the intention seemed to be to demonstrate the futility of any judgments with respect to beauty, allure, or even appeal. The dresses did not enhance the bodies, nor the bodies the dresses, and the wearers did not look happy in them.