The Most Happy Fella is a 1956 musical with a book, music, and lyrics by Frank Loesser. The story, about a romance between an older man and younger woman, is based on the 1924 play They Knew What They Wanted by Sidney Howard. The show is described by some theatre historians and critics as operatic. The original Broadway production ran for 14 months and it has enjoyed several revivals, including one staged by the New York City Opera. It was broadcast in a live telecast of the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday, October 28, 1956, the night of Elvis Presley's second appearance on that show. That broadcast was seen in some 168 stations in North America and garnered a 34.6 rating, a 57% share, with an estimated audience of 56.5 million viewers. Background and history A friend of Frank Loesser's recommended the Howard play They Knew What They Wanted as material for a musical in 1952. After he read it, Loesser agreed it had musical potential, but decided to omit the political, labor, and religious material. It took him four years to complete the musical. The Most Happy Fella frequently has been described as an opera, but some have qualified the term. In his book The World of Musical Comedy, Stanley Green noted that the musical is "one of the most ambitiously operatic works ever written for the Broadway theatre ... Loesser said 'I may give the impression this show has operatic tendencies. If people feel that way – fine. Actually all it has is a great frequency of songs. It's a musical with music.' " In an article in the Playbill Magazine for the original Broadway production, Loesser wrote, "What was left seemed to me to be a very warm simple love story, happy ending and all, and dying to be sung and danced." Brooks Atkinson, theatre critic (The New York Times), called it a "music drama", noting Loesser "has now come about as close to opera as the rules of Broadway permit." Composer, conductor, and musical theatre teacher Lehman Engel and critic/author Howard Kissel called it a "fresh musical (perhaps opera)". Music Theatre International describes the show: "Filled with sweeping ballads, intense dramatic arias and tuneful, splashy Broadway-style numbers, this ambitious "Broadway opera" has found a home on opera and musical-theatre stages alike." A film version was planned in 1962, to be produced by Warner Bros. with Shirley