Career
In 1948, Broadway producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin asked Loesser to write both music and lyrics to George Abbott's book for an adaptation of the Brandon Thomas play Charley's Aunt. That musical, Where's Charley? (1948), starred Ray Bolger, and ran for a successful 792 performances. This led to his next musical, Guys and Dolls (1950), based on the stories of Damon Runyon, and again produced by Feuer and Martin. Guys and Dolls became a hit and earned Loesser two Tony Awards.
He wrote the book, music and lyrics for his next two musicals, The Most Happy Fella (1956) and Greenwillow (1960). He wrote the music and lyrics for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), which ran for 1,417 performances and won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and for which he received two more Tonys.
The last musical that he worked on, Pleasures and Palaces (1965), closed during out-of-town tryouts.
Another unproduced musical, Señor Discretion Himself, premiered after his death. He started working on a musical version of the Budd Schulberg short story Señor Discretion Himself in 1966, but stopped working on it after 2 years. A version was presented in 1985 at the New York Musical Theatre Works. With the support of Jo Loesser, a completed version was presented at the Arena Stage, Washington, DC, in 2004, reworked by the group Culture Clash and director Charles Randolph-Wright.
Read more about this topic: Frank Loesser
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)