STAGE : Most ‘Happy’ Again : A slimmed-down revival of a Frank Loesser gem heads to Broadway from Connecticut--via the Doolittle

When legendary songwriter Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” opened on Broadway in 1956, some three dozen musicians were in the orchestra pit. When the show’s three-record cast album was recorded, more than 100 instruments were said to have played the operatic arias, pop tunes and ballads.

So, when the show was being revived last spring at the small Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., director Gerald Gutierrez naturally worried about reviving the big brassy musical with only 10 or 12 musicians--all that could be squeezed into the pit at the 400-seat theater.

Gutierrez and colleagues did what Loesser himself long wanted to do--cut the sound down without reducing the impact of the story. When the New York critics descended on the Goodspeed in May, they still saw a musical packed with singers and dancers, but accompanied by only two pianos. Their raves rivaled the fanfare the show received 35 years ago.

Now that successful two-piano version is headed for Broadway--but not before the Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson presents it at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood for 10 weeks starting Thursday.

“The Most Happy Fella,” which was Loesser’s next big hit after “Guys and Dolls” in 1950, is based on Sidney Howard’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, “They Knew What They Wanted.” Set in Napa Valley in the 1920s, it chronicles the romance of a 60ish immigrant grape grower and his young mail-order bride, a San Francisco waitress.

Tony Esposito courts waitress Amy--his “Rosabella”--to a score that wraps in Puccini, rousing production numbers like “Big D,” barbershop quartet renditions of songs like “Standing on the Corner” and ballads like “Joey, Joey, Joey.” “Fella’s” assorted love stories, tragedies and celebrations are set to enough musical styles to populate several Broadway shows.

Simpler accompaniment allows the drama to hook together all those songs, Gutierrez says. “There’s a big gap between the operatic and musical comedy sounds, but the two-piano (version) homogenizes them,” he says. “It forces you to really believe in the story.”

“Fella,” Loesser once wrote, is “all about LOVE--acknowledged the world over to be a most singable subject and one which no songwriter dares duck for very long if he wants to stay popular and solvent.”

Although there was plenty of love in Howard’s play, Loesser was originally put off by religious and labor elements he said would be tough to set to song and dance. But when he honed the story down, what he found was “a very warm simple love story, happy ending and all, and dying to be sung and danced.”

What better challenge for the man who wrote “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York”? Over nearly five years, he wrote not just the libretto but more than 30 songs for his “extended musical comedy.” With its emphasis on song over spoken dialogue, “The Most Happy Fella” came long before such shows as “Sweeney Todd” and “Les Miserables” popularized operatic musicals.

It was also a challenge for the Goodspeed Opera House, the place that launched “Annie” and has revived many a musical. “We’d been wanting to do (“Fella”) for a long time,” says Michael Price, the Goodspeed’s executive director, “and we finally felt we had a company that could do it.”

Enter Gutierrez, who had directed two earlier shows at the Goodspeed, been trained as a musician, and grew up listening to the “Fella” cast album. Thrilled to discover a two-piano arrangement of the show done by Robert Page in the early ‘60s, the two men rented pianos, got some performers together, and essentially auditioned the score.

Loesser himself had authorized Page’s arrangement, recalls Loesser’s widow Jo Sullivan, who originated the role of Rosabella on Broadway. “Frank always said he wanted to go to (Greenwich) Village and see it done small,” says Sullivan, who serves as artistic associate on this production.

“The rap (the show) takes is that it’s dull--well-intentioned but . . . ‘heavy furniture’--and it’s not,” Gutierrez says. “It’s funny and deeply touching. And I think you have a bigger shot at getting to what is touching and funny--the heart of it--when you don’t have dozens of instruments between you and the piece.”

Once the decision was made to do a two-piano production, says the director, other decisions fell into place in terms of trims, choreography and set design. In the opening sequence, for instance, waitress Cleo’s song about her sore feet was originally followed by a short ballet before “Rosabella” was introduced. Out it went, Gutierrez explains, because you want to meet the heroine faster.

“You follow the dramatic lines so it’s more cinematic,” says Gutierrez, whose changes in pacing and focus have reduced “Fella’s” playing time by about half an hour. “The audience doesn’t have to swim through a symphonic sea to get to the action.”

Los Angeles rehearsals take place at the Music Center Annex, a spare two-story building across from the Music Center on Temple Street. Gutierrez’s well-behaved dog, a Yorkie named Phyllis, sits on a chair beside him as the director runs through his show. Because most of the cast began with the show at the Goodspeed and there were three weeks of rehearsals in New York last month, the director seems to be doing primarily fine-tuning.

The real hurdle was casting, says Gutierrez, who describes similar problems directing “Carousel” last year for the Houston Opera. “Material isn’t written like this anymore,” he says. “Actors today belt. They don’t sing (because) they’re not required to. You don’t have Richard Rodgers writing anymore. Actors have learned to do what they’re paid to do, which is belt.”

For instance, opera singer Spiro Malas plays Tony, a shy, aging bachelor with a big heart. “ I don’t know of an actor who could do Tony Esposito who isn’t an opera singer,” Gutierrez says. “It requires enormous technique.”

Malas performed here over the years with the New York City Opera, while several other performers in the show also have operatic training or backgrounds. “I sang at the Met for 10 years and this is as exciting or more exciting than anything that happened to me there,” says Claudia Catania, who plays Tony’s bossy younger sister, Marie. “It’s an unusual occurence to be able to bridge different art forms.”

Catania and others also praise the emphasis on story in this production. “I think it was always approached musically rather than theatrically,” says Catania, who once played Rosabella in a college production of the show. “The music never overshadows the real moment in this production.” Adds Malas: “Gerry makes us think of it as a story with music embellishing the story.”

The director reinterpreted the character of Rosabella early on, for example. “If you play it as young, blond innocent ingenue, you have no reality,” he says. “A beautiful young thing who goes to a ranch and finds this would repack her bags and go back to San Francisco. In (Howard’s) play, the woman is hard, desperate, at the end of her rope. This is her last chance.”

Mary Gordon Murray, who plays Rosabella, appreciates that reinterpretation, she says during a rehearsal break. (Sophie Hayden, who is expecting a baby any day, originated the role of Rosabella at the Goodspeed and will return to it on Broadway.) “She is much more dimensional and believable in the ‘90s, more like the original play,” says Murray, seen here two years ago as the Baker’s Wife in Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” “The fact they fall in love is . . . more earned.”

When ‘The Most Happy Fella’ opened on Broadway in 1956, critics called it everything from “a musical landmark” to “a masterpiece.” New York Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson considered Loesser’s musical “a rare achievement for the theatre,” and the Herald Tribune’s Walter Kerr wrote “the riches are almost beyond counting.”

This will be “Fella’s” third Broadway incarnation--it was back briefly in 1979--and will closely follow a high-profile production by the New York City Opera that closes next week. Gutierrez says he isn’t worried about competition--the audience is different and NYCO will do only 10 performances--but adds he certainly appreciated all the attendant publicity: “If anything, it raised interest in (the show).”

Price says they could have filled the Goodspeed for another month before closing it in July to make room for a new musical based on the film “Arthur.” Instead, the Goodspeed is taking the show the 110 miles to Broadway where “Fella” will be its 13th New York transfer. The show is scheduled to start performances at the 785-seat Booth Theatre in late January with a Feb. 13 opening.

By producing the show here, the Center Theatre Group joins the Goodspeed, New York’s Lincoln Center Theater and the Shubert Organization as co-producers of the Broadway production. “Fella” rehearsed in New York at Lincoln Center Theater, whose subscribers will be among the Broadway production’s first audiences.

The show will have cost about $1.2 million by the time it opens at the Booth, a far cry from the $5 million or more that most Broadway musicals cost these days. But everyone involved insists that using two pianists instead of a full orchestra is an aesthetic rather than financial decision.

In Los Angeles, the CTG/Ahmanson has picked up costs of more than $200,000 for sets, costumes, and rehearsals, says Gordon Davidson, producing director. Davidson says those costs are comparable to what CTG usually spends on such musical production elements. Speaking of both artistic and financial impulses, Davidson says the show fits into his programming plans for “musicals in more intimate environs” and offers possible future income.

In exchange for remounting the show at the Doolittle, says Davidson, CTG will share in potential Broadway profits. Referring to similar joint ventures on August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” last year and Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” later this season, Davidson says: “These are tough times, and we’re trying not to limit what we do but to find new ways to afford to do what we do. These (opportunities) share the cost of mounting something, and, with ‘Piano Lesson’ and maybe ‘Fella,’ the possibility of some income.”

Loesser’s widow Sullivan, meanwhile, couldn’t be more pleased at another Broadway shot for the show. “ ‘My Fair Lady’ opened less than two months before us,” Sullivan says. “It was a fabulous show and such a tremendous hit that we were just lost in the shuffle. If Frank were here today, he’d be really proud . . . at how the show holds up and how they’re praising his musical ability. We got kind of slid over.”