The Most Snappy Fella

What's playin' at the Opera?

I'll tell ya what's playin' at the Opera.

Musical by a Broadway kinda guy who wrote an operatic show that'd please everyone from Hedda Gabler to Hedda Hoppra.

That's what's playin' at the Opera.

If you see a guy whose star shines in the musical-comedy sky right now, you can bet it'll be Frank Loesser. Though the songwriter died in 1969, his work is enjoying a burgeoning revival. Last week Loesser's "musical with a lotta music," The Most Happy Fella (1956), opened to bravos and bouquets at the New York City Opera in Lincoln Center. A more intimate version of Fella will come to Broadway later this season, as will Loesser's damn-near-immortal Guys and Dolls (1950). This summer's straw-hat circuit was brightened by Where's Charley? (1948), starring Loesser's widow Jo Sullivan and their daughter Emily Loesser. The American Stage Festival mounted a reading of Greenwillow (1960), with an eye to a full staging next spring. Now if someone, please, will only pull How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961) out of mothballs -- and it's still as fresh as a Paris original -- all of Loesser's Broadway shows will be accounted for.

Loesser's output as a Hollywood songwriter, in the years before the composer-lyricist-librettist ganged up on Broadway, needs no revival. It already ornaments every TV late show. Loesser's catchy titles and skewed wit helped lodge many a song in the musical muscle memory of anyone who loves vintage pop: Heart and Soul and Two Sleepy People (music by Hoagy Carmichael), I Don't Want to Walk Without You (Jule Styne), Jingle Jangle Jingle (Joseph Lilley), Hoop-Dee-Doo (Milton DeLugg). And when Loesser began marrying his own music to his words, he hatched even more smashes: What Are You Doing New Year's Eve? On a Slow Boat to China and a few instant standards, including No Two People and Wonderful Copenhagen, for the 1952 movie Hans Christian Andersen.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving fella. Loesser would tell you that. As brash as any gravel-gargling high roller from Guys and Dolls, he was famous for telling his singers, "Loud is good," and he applied that maxim to his professional life. For Loesser, a song was melodrama in miniature: he loved the counterpoint of two hearts and voices in seductive competition, as in Baby, It's Cold Outside and many other contentious duets. They were an expression of his own tumultuous personality. During Guys and Dolls rehearsals, exasperated by Isabel Bigley's tentative attempts at I'll Know, Loesser stormed onstage and punched his leading lady in the nose. The show's Adelaide, Vivian Blaine, remembers him more fondly: "A lovable, raucous man with a deliciously evil laugh." Ever restless, he'd catch a few hours' sleep, start his composing (on a silent piano) at 4 a.m. and be ready for a martini at 8 a.m. "After all," says Sullivan, with whom Loesser fell in love when she sang the female lead in Most Happy Fella, "it was lunchtime for him."