Andrea Marcovicci

CHICAGO SUN -TIMES

Loesser deserves more
(http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/weiss/2430524,frank-loesser-tribute-062710.article)

June 27, 2010

BY HEDY WEISS Sun-Times Theater Critic

Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frank Loesser, one of the greatest American songwriters. Attention should be paid, but the celebrations in Chicago (or in New York and Hollywood for that matter) are surprisingly few and far between. It’s difficult to understand why.

After all, we are talking about the man who wrote the music and lyrics for such Broadway classics as “Guys and Dolls” (a show many consider to be the greatest of all American musicals, despite some stiff competition), “The Most Happy Fella” (one of the most operatic of shows), and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (one of the sharpest and earliest looks at America’s postwar corporate culture); the man who penned the endearing songs for the 1952 film, “Hans Christian Andersen” (including classics such  as “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Inch Worm” and “Thumbelina”), and standards such as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” “On a Slow Boat to China” and “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”

True, Andrea Marcovicci, that mistress of the cabaret room, will bring her show, “If I Were a Bell — The Songs of Frank Loesser” to Davenport’s Piano Bar here for four performances in July.

And in New York earlier this month, Loesser’s widow, Jo Sullivan Loesser (a gifted interpreter of her late husband’s work), was among the honorary chairs of the American Theatre Wing’s annual spring gala that paid tribute to Loesser, with Harry Connick Jr., Megan Mullally and Kelli O’Hara doing the performing honors.

 “I’m glad I’m the one carrying the torch,” said Marcovicci. “Maybe people were worried that after last year’s surfeit of tributes to Johnny Mercer that audiences might be tired of these sorts of things. But there really is nowhere near the fuss that Loesser deserves, so I’m happy and proud to be doing my show, which I first performed back in 2004. I’ll even be performing it at the Gardenia Club in Los Angeles this Tuesday, his birthday, before coming to Chicago.”

Asked to describe Loesser’s work, Marcovicci came up with three words: “Enduring, catchy and American. He also was a master of slang.”

“Loesser could end a song with the words ‘no siree’,” said the singer. “Only Irving Berlin and Cole Porter could match him in that. He was just such an American kind of guy — so hip and hep and cool.”

Marcovicci knows that it’s “Guys and Dolls” that sets audiences humming with its irresistible melodies and Runyonesque lyrics (and a song list that includes such gems as “Fugue for Tinhorns,” “The Oldest Established,” “Adelaide’s Lament,” “If I Were a Bell,” “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” “Take Back Your Mink,” “Luck Be a Lady,” and “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat”).

“That score is just so groovy in its gangsterish, male way, though it also can be completely swoony, too,” she said. “But it’s Loesser’s songs for the movies that I’m probably most taken with — things like ‘Let’s Get Lost,’ ‘Slow Boat to China,’ ‘Kiss the Boys Goodbye,’ ‘Moments Like This,’ ‘I Wish I Didn’t Love You So,’ ‘Love Isn’t Born (It’s Made).’ Many of them were written during the war years — the 1940s.”

Loesser (1910-1969), was born into a highbrow German-Jewish family in New York. His father was a classical piano teacher and his older half-brother was a renowned concert pianist, musicologist and teacher. But Frank preferred pop music from the start and was more or less self-taught — dropping out of college during the Depression, taking a variety of odd jobs and beginning to write songs, sketches, radio scripts and nightclub acts. He landed a Hollywood contract in 1936 and proceeded to write the lyrics for songs in more than 60 films.

Once he came back east he started writing for Broadway, penning the music as well as the lyrics. And as Marcovicci noted, “Once he started doing both he never looked back.”

Marcovicci, whose cabaret act follows a more or less chronological arc, and includes both Hollywood and Broadway songs, said she admires Loesser’s “toughness and wicked sense of humor.” She also wishes he had lived longer. (A heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer at age 59).

As for any delayed appreciations of Loesser in summers to come, Welz Kauffman, president and CEO of the Ravinia Festival noted: “It certainly is not out of the question. We had such a huge success in 2007 with Marc Robin’s staged concert version of ‘The Most Happy Fella,’ which starred George Hearn. And there was even talk of a London production, though that never worked out. We’ve talked about reinventing Loesser’s ‘Greenwillow’ [the lyrical, short-lived 1960 Broadway musical about a family of “wandering men”], but so far it’s just talk.”

“What’s interesting about Loesser is how tricky his music is to sing,” said Kauffman. “It’s so spiky, so full of rhythmical tricks and syncopation, as well as the kind of speed we now associate with Sondheim. There was real musical complexity in his work.”

Indeed, Loesser was a force to be reckoned with. As Robert Kimball recounts in his introduction to The Complete Lyrics of Frank Loesser (Knopf, 2003):

“The morning after the triumphant opening night [in November 1950] of the musical fable, ‘Guys and Dolls,’ Irving Berlin placed a phone call to Richard Rodgers [and said] ‘Dick, what are we going to do about the kid?’