![]() ![]() Malas performed here over the years with the New York City Opera, while several other performers in the show also have operatic training or backgrounds. ![]() " I don’t know of an actor who could do Tony Esposito who isn’t an opera singer,” Gutierrez says. Actors have learned to do what they’re paid to do, which is belt.”įor instance, opera singer Spiro Malas plays Tony, a shy, aging bachelor with a big heart. You don’t have Richard Rodgers writing anymore. They don’t sing (because) they’re not required to. “Material isn’t written like this anymore,” he says. The real hurdle was casting, says Gutierrez, who describes similar problems directing “Carousel” last year for the Houston Opera. Because most of the cast began with the show at the Goodspeed and there were three weeks of rehearsals in New York last month, the director seems to be doing primarily fine-tuning. Gutierrez’s well-behaved dog, a Yorkie named Phyllis, sits on a chair beside him as the director runs through his show. Los Angeles rehearsals take place at the Music Center Annex, a spare two-story building across from the Music Center on Temple Street. “The audience doesn’t have to swim through a symphonic sea to get to the action.” ![]() ![]() “You follow the dramatic lines so it’s more cinematic,” says Gutierrez, whose changes in pacing and focus have reduced “Fella’s” playing time by about half an hour. Thrilled to discover a two-piano arrangement of the show done by Robert Page in the early ‘60s, the two men rented pianos, got some performers together, and essentially auditioned the score. “We’d been wanting to do (“Fella”) for a long time,” says Michael Price, the Goodspeed’s executive director, “and we finally felt we had a company that could do it.”Įnter Gutierrez, who had directed two earlier shows at the Goodspeed, been trained as a musician, and grew up listening to the “Fella” cast album. It was also a challenge for the Goodspeed Opera House, the place that launched “Annie” and has revived many a musical. What better challenge for the man who wrote “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York”? Over nearly five years, he wrote not just the libretto but more than 30 songs for his “extended musical comedy.” With its emphasis on song over spoken dialogue, “The Most Happy Fella” came long before such shows as “Sweeney Todd” and “Les Miserables” popularized operatic musicals. ![]()
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