Will It Run On Broadway?

[edjames]

Straight off the success of the Oklahoma revival, director, Daniel Fish, has announced his next project. Once again, he is intent on a non-traditional production, and including members of the LGBT community in the cast.

Whether or not it transitions to another home after it's summer run upstate is another story, and as the article mentions, they are still in negotiations with the Loesser estate for the rights.

As with his revival of Oklahoma, it's sure to cause a lot of discussion and controversy.

 

 

Daniel Fish’s Post-‘Oklahoma!’ Musical: ‘The Most Happy Fella’

 

The 1956 musical drama, with an acclaimed operatic score, will premiere this summer at Bard SummerScape in Annandale-on-Hudson.

 

Daniel Fish, the director behind the Tony Award-winning “Oklahoma!” revival, has a new midcentury musical reinvention project in the works: Frank Loesser’s acclaimed, quasi-operatic “The Most Happy Fella.”

The 1956 “music drama,” as it was then coined in a New York Times review, is an unorthodox love story between a middle-aged vineyard owner and his mail-order waitress bride.

Fish’s production will open this summer at the Bard SummerScapefestival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Details are still being discussed with Loesser’s estate; his wife, Jo Sullivan Loesser — whom he met after she starred as Rosabella in the original “Most Happy” production — died in April.

If the first line of the casting announcement is any indication, Fish will be working in a similar vein to “Oklahoma!”: “This will not be a conventional production of ‘The Most Happy Fella.’”

 

He is gathering a small ensemble of seven performers, according to the casting notice, who will not be divided into the show’s traditional roles. The production is “strongly” encouraging performers who identify as transgender, nonbinary or queer to audition, the notice said.

Expect “a nontraditional treatment of the existing material,” a SummerScape spokesman said, “with an emphasis on Loesser’s exquisite score.”

 

The “Oklahoma!” revival, which stresses the underlying darkness in what had been seen as a sunny American story, took shape at the same Bard festival in 2015, going on to Broadway earlier this year. One of the bigger changes came through in the stripped-down score, orchestrated by a music team that will also join “The Most Happy Fella.”

Loesser wrote the music, book and lyrics for “The Most Happy Fella,” which is based on Sidney Howard’s 1924 play “They Knew What They Wanted." The show is more dramatic than some of Loesser’s better-known comedic hits — including “Guys and Dolls” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” — but the music has long been cited as one of his most striking compositions.

The show was revived on Broadway in 1979 and 1992, and enjoyed a New York City Opera production in 2006.

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/theater/daniel-fish-the-most-happy-fella.html

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

I really disliked his OK, but I'll still see his MHF.

 

Art should make you feel something: Whether you like it or not.

[bostonman]

Jo Sullivan (Loesser) indeed passed away earlier this year. Otherwise, I wonder if she would have given her approval to this.

 

I'll be intrigued to see how this works - I'm personally thinking that a cast of only 7 actors is way too small for the show in general and for, as the article states, "Loesser's exquisite score" (It's a masterpiece of a score, IMO), even for a small-scale revival of the show - but we'll see what he does...

 

There's also an excellent 2-piano arrangement that was used in the off-Broadway revival a few decades ago - but I assume we'll be hearing something different for this production?

Edited December 24, 2019 by bostonman