Abstract
DESPITE protestations that he had composed not an opera but musical with a lot of music, Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella, which premiered at Broadway's Imperial Theater, on May 3, 1956, ranks among the relatively few American musicals that merit the operatic rubric.' It had 676 performances, a first-run success that far surpassed other operatic musicals, including Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (124 performances in 1935), Bernstein's Candide (which began its run of 73 performances several months after Loesser's triumph), and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (1979), with its Broadway run of 557 performances. The Most Happy Fella, adapted from Sidney Howard's 1924 play, They Knew What They Wanted, is further distinguished by its sole authorship (libretto-lyrics-music), the only one of Loesser's five Broadway musicals for which he chose to work entirely without a librettist, a phenomenon as rare in opera as it is in musicals.2
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