I Believe in You
There has been some fanfare—although some (myself included) will argue not enough—around the centenaries of two important American composers this year: Samuel Barber and William Schuman. I’m also actually surprised that more hasn’t been made of the centenaries of Mary Lou Williams, Alex North, and Paul Bowles, which are also this year. But today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of my all-time compositional heroes, Frank Loesser, so I wanted to pay tribute to him.
Fans of musical theatre don’t need to be reminded of Guys and Dolls or How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Both reinvented the genre and yet were hugely successful in their original Broadway runs with critics and audiences alike. They also spawned films that continue to attract new fans and are frequently revived on stage as well, G&D most recently last year. Devotees will additionally chime in about the staggering achievement of The Most Happy Fella which over the past couple of decades has been embraced by opera houses since it contains so much music—when the original cast album was first released in 1956, it filled three LP records.
But interest in Loesser’s output sadly often stops there. Fans of Danny Kaye will be familiar with the songs Loesser wrote for the 1952 movie Hans Christian Anderson. That score includes the marvelous contrapuntal “Inch Worm” to which a few years later John Coltrane gave an extended modal “My Favorite Things”-type treatment, to equally stunning effect. And hardcore film and theatre collectors will trot out the OCA for Greenwillow (1960) which starred Anthony Perkins, a solid musical theatre singer who unfortunately got permanently typecast after playing Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho, released later that same year.
The first Broadway production for which Loesser wrote a complete musical score was Where’s Charley? (1948), starring the legendary Ray Bolger. It ran for 792 performances, longer than the original run of The Most Happy Fella, but a recording strike prevented an original cast album. In fact, it was so successful that a film version starring Bolger was released in 1952, but that film has not been issued commercially on videotape or DVD to this day. Luckily a cast album exists for the 1958 London stage production, albeit without Bolger. But the British cast is actually quite appropriate considering that the show is set in Oxford. Loesser also wrote hundreds of songs for various films, including vehicles for Esther Williams and the underrated Betty Hutton, as well as a slew of lyrics for other composers early in his career, including William Schuman who remained a lifelong friend. His extreme musical sensitivity to the inflections of language is no doubt a by-product of his many years of writing only words.
Late in his short life, Loesser composed the score for the wacky Russian-themed Pleasures and Palaces, a 1965 show that never survived out of town previews and which is still in need of a full production and recording. And his final unfinished work, Señor Discretion Himself (1968), was only staged posthumously in Washington D.C. in 2004 but has also yet to be recorded. If these lesser known achievements contain anything like the material in the Loesser canon that is readily available, they should be more widely disseminated, especially in this centenary year.
Aficionados of the great American song rightly treasure Loesser’s extraordinarily witty lyrics and unforgettable melodies, but his output contains invaluable lessons for composers of any stylistic inclination who are interested in writing effectively for the voice. Aside from some amazing vocal counterpoint and occasional passages in quintuple time (the kind of stuff that should immediately disarm anyone who claims that Loesser was less than completely serious as a composer), Loesser’s often jagged musical phrases, while initially seeming awkward in musical notation, flow totally naturally and are among the most effective settings of American English that anyone has ever done. Happy birthday, Frank!