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Robert Weede: “The Most Happy Fella” — 9 Comments

  1. I like to ask this question of people.
    If you could live your life as a character in a Broadway musical, which one would it be?
    I’ll go first – Nellie Forbush in South Pacific.
    Care to share?

  2. There’s a 1940 movie of the play that The Most Happy Fella is based on, They Knew What They Wanted. Not a musical, a straight drama, with Charles Laughton playing the Italian vineyard owner. I haven’t seen it, but it’s really hard imagining him in that role.

  3. babka:

    How fascinating. I wouldn’t have even recognized that as Laughton, I don’t think.

  4. Thanks for this! I actually played Tony in a production of “The Most Happy Fella” with Regina Lyric Light Opera in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1997. One of my favorite roles ever, right up there with Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” whom I played three years later.

  5. Only because this is a semi-literary post, did you notice that Google’s doodle is for Virginia Woolf’s 136th birthday?
    I confess to not only never having read her work, but to also never wanting to.

  6. Molly Brown Says:
    January 24th, 2018 at 6:50 pm
    * *
    I never wanted to be anyone in a musical, but would have liked to play quite a few, because of the “meatiness” or “fun” of the role.

  7. Beautiful but dated. I liked the clip of Tozzi simply because the Italian accent was natural and unforced. Which is a marker of changing tastes as well as shifting mores.

    This musical is part of a brief period when “middle-brow” meant something – the period when the first wave of variety TV shows (broadcasting from Manhattan) featured Metropolitan Opera stars.

    It was also a period when the “big three” white immigrant ethnicities – Italian, Jewish, Irish – were making their marks in the American entertainment industry. And when ethnicity was addressed more directly in America.

    It is telling that opera companies which constantly troll for new-yet-tolerably-harmonic works (and have adopted Broadway musicals like SweeneyTodd, Follies, and Les Miserables) have overlooked this one, for all its operatic beauty.

  8. I saw a late 1950’s ad for Ford on YouTube, with “Watching All The Fords Go By”.

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