The miracle of director Gerald Gutierrez’s new production, which originated at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and has just opened on Broadway, is that it blows all the conventional wisdom away. Two simple but radical alterations have transformed “The Most Happy Fella” into a show that now has a soul as stirring as its sound. The first, and most daring, is that Gutierrez has thrown out the splendid orchestral arrangement of the score, and replaced it with a minimal two-piano accompaniment (which Loesser himself authorized in the early ’60s). What’s lost in lushness is more than compensated for by the intimacy and immediacy of the proceedings. Tony (Spiro Malas), the gregarious but insecure bachelor; Rosabella (Sophie Hayden), the lonely San Francisco waitress who responds to his letters; Joe (Charles Pistone), the handsome foreman whose photograph Tony sends to lure her to Napa, and the Texans Cleo and Herman (Liz Larsen and Scott Waara), who provide comic relief, emerge in this fleet, touching production with their robust humanity intact. The voices are great, but this time you can hear the heartbeat too.
Gutierrez’s second, and smartest, revision, is his rethinking of Rosabella’s character. She’s traditionally been played as an innocent blond ingenue, a ’50s convention that never made any emotional sense. As played by Hayden, Rosabella is now an earthy, disappointed woman grabbing a last chance at love. Suddenly the emotional dynamic-her desperate one-night stand with Joe on her wedding night, her slowly kindling love for the kindly, clumsy Tony–makes sense.
Loesser’s score has lost none of its seductive power, and the wonderful ensemble sees to it that it always serves the dramatic end. “Happy To Make Your Acquaintance,” a love song disguised as an English lesson, has added poignancy in Malas and Hayden’s restrained rendition. Pistone brings a haunting regret to the popular “Joey, Joey, Joey.” “How Beautiful the Days” is a quartet of almost Mozartian loveliness, and the boisterous, feast-preparing “Abbondanza” has never been staged with such new vaudevillian gusto. The deliciously brassy Larsen and the hilariously sunny Waara bring fresh charm to their snappy comic duets. There’s real chemistry both in their broad courtship and in the mature, autumnal romance between Hayden and the superb Malas, who invests Tony with an aching, ardent sweetness. This full-scale but intimate “Most Happy Fella” is a model of what an intelligent revival should be. No exercise in mere nostalgia, Gutierrez, choreographer Liza Gennaro and set designer John Lee Beatty honor their source by stripping it down to its sturdy, heartfelt struts and beams. It shines as if brand new.
