Late Broadway master's lost musical makes belated debut

Thirty-five years after his death, a previously unfinished musical by one of the masters of the Broadway show tune was due to be premiered on an American stage last night.

Thirty-five years after his death, a previously unfinished musical by one of the masters of the Broadway show tune was due to be premiered on an American stage last night.

Frank Loesser, whose best-known songs include "Wonderful Copenhagen" and "Luck Be a Lady", was working on Señor Discretion Himself when he died in 1969, aged 59.

The Oscar-winning composer and lyricist achieved fame with his smash hit musicals Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

His final work tells the story of a Mexican small-town drunk who unwittingly becomes a prophet. The tale of the illiterate baker, who Loesser based on a short story by Budd Schulberg, lay untouched for years before a trio of Latino performers, Culture Clash, were invited by his widow, Jo Sullivan Loesser, to complete it.

They trimmed Loesser's original 300-page draft to a faster-paced, 100-page treatment, rewriting it in modern-day vernacular, and reinter- preting the songs which, when they received their first airing at the Arena Stage in Washington DC, were likely to show a departure from Loesser's earlier work.

"Frank wanted to do something different," Mrs Sullivan Loesser said, recalling the two years her late husband spent working on his final project. "We listened to Mexican music all day and went to Mexico several times."

Loesser was responsible for some of the most enduring show tunes of the Fifties and Sixties despite never receiving formal musical training. His father was a classically trained pianist, but refused to teach him because he objected to his son's love of popular music.

He wrote his first song at the age of six and, after dropping out of college, had an unsuccessful brush with Broadway when a musical to which he had contributed lyrics closed after five performances.

However, it was enough to get Loesser noticed, and he landed a contract in Hollywood, where he went on to write songs for more than 60 films, and penned his first hit in the wartime song "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition".

His masterwork, Guys and Dolls, opened in 1950, winning a Tony for best musical, and spawning classics such as "Luck Be A Lady" and "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat". The 1961 musical How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying won the Pulitzer prize and seven Tonys while his score for the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen was nominated for an Oscar, an award he won for one of his best-known compositions, Baby It's Cold Outside, in 1948.

The rediscovery of an entirely new work - including 17 songs - by one of the favourite sons of American showbusiness has caused great excitement at the theatre chosen to stage it.

"Having a Frank Loesser musical that's never been produced is the theatre world's equivalent to discovering a lost album of the Beatles," said Molly Smith, the Arena Stage's artistic director.