Loesser’s great American songbooks get a new read

Connoisseurs of that repository known as the Great American Songbook often point to Frank Loesser as one of its most versatile contributors. First lyricist, then both composer and lyricist, Loesser wrote more than 700 songs, working at various points in his life for Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood and Broadway.

His songs are always around -- anytime you hear someone banging out “Heart and Soul” on the keyboard, you have Loesser to thank for the words he set to Hoagy Carmichael’s music. This time of year, weather reports often borrow “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” one of Loesser’s most famous song titles. (He also wrote the music -- and took home the Oscar for best song of 1949.)

If “You’re Either Too Young or Too Old” to know a Loesser song or two, pity.

Now, as the year draws to a close, several Loesser projects are drawing special attention to his talents, with more to come next year.

Andrea Marcovicci’s annual visit to the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room is celebrating Loesser’s music in a show she has titled “If I Were a Bell” after a song in “Guys and Dolls,” Loesser’s most beloved Broadway show.

From that 1950 hit, the singer also has pulled “I’ll Know,” which she tells audiences is “the most beautiful love song ever written.”

Along with the floral bouquets whisked up to Marcovicci when she opened last month was a copy of “The Complete Lyrics of Frank Loesser,” the newly published collection of his work edited by Robert Kimball and Steve Nelson.

The timing seemed perfect, although, as Marcovicci groused the other day, she “would have had a much easier time if this book had already been out.” The singer’s shows are always a tapestry of biography and song, and she is known for her thorough research.

Compiling the lyrics took a lot of research as well, say editor Kimball and Jo Sullivan Loesser, the songwriter’s widow.

“We worked on the book for eight years,” said Loesser, who is also having Marcovicci’s Oak Room show recorded for a CD.

Jo Loesser, who met her husband when she was cast in his folk opera, “The Most Happy Fella,” on Broadway in 1956, has been the driving force behind a production of “Senor Discretion Himself,” Loesser’s last, and until recently unfinished, stage musical, planned for a spring production at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

The Latino team Culture Clash, whom Jo Loesser jokingly calls “the Mexican Marx Brothers,” has been commissioned to rework her husband’s original book, based on a short story by Budd Schulberg.

“Frank abandoned it because he got sick and it got to be too much,” she says. “But I never forgot it.” (Loesser, frequently photographed with a cigarette, died of lung cancer in 1969, when he was 59, and his remains were scattered over Moriches Bay, N.Y. His widow still has a home out east, its contents including “Frank’s seven Hirschfelds.”)

A stage production also is being planned for “Hans Christian Andersen,” originally a 1952 film with music and lyrics by Loesser. Jo Loesser says that Maury Yeston has been commissioned to rework the book, and a production will take place next year in London. Also in 2004, the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey will produce a revival of “Guys and Dolls,” and Jo Loesser is hoping for another revival of that show in London in 2005.

Having edited compilations of the lyrics of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin, Kimball was impressed by Frank Loesser’s eclectic output: “He wrote songs for 95 movies, which was really a whole other career before Broadway. It’s fascinating how he transformed himself from lyric writer to composer. And, when you look at his shows, they’re all so incredibly different.”