My Fair Lady was without doubt the most popularly successful musical of its era. Before the close of its spectacular run of 2,717 performances from 1956 to 1962 it had comfortably surpassed Oklahoma!’s previous record of 2,248.1 And unlike the ephemeral success of the wartime Broadway heroines depicted in Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus, librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner’s and composer Frederick “Fritz” Loewe’s fair lady went on to age phenomenally well. Most remarkably, over eighteen million cast albums were sold and profits from the staged performances, albums, and 1964 film came to the then-astronomical figure of $800 million. Critically successful revivals followed in 1975 and 1981, the latter with Rex Harrison (Henry Higgins) and Cathleen Nesbitt (Mrs. Higgins) reclaiming their original Broadway roles. In 1993 the work returned once again, this time with television miniseries superstar Richard Chamberlain as Higgins, newcomer Melissa Errico as Eliza, and Julian Holloway playing Alfred P. Doolittle, the role his father, Stanley, created on Broadway on March 15, 1956.
As with most of the musicals under scrutiny in the present survey, the popular and financial success of My Fair Lady was and continues to be matched by critical acclaim. Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune told his readers: “Don’t bother to finish reading this review now. You’d better sit down and send for those tickets to My Fair Lady.”2 William Hawkins of the World-Telegram & Sun wrote that the show “prances into that rare class of great musicals” and that “quite simply, it has everything,” providing “a legendary evening” with songs that “are likely to be unforgettable.”3 In what may be the highest tribute paid to the show, Harrison reported that “Cole Porter reserved himself a seat once a week for the entire run.”4
Opening night critics immediately recognized that My Fair Lady fully measured up to the Rodgers and Hammerstein model of an integrated musical. As Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror wrote: “The Lerner-Loewe songs are not only delightful, they advance the action as well. They are ever so much more than interpolations, or interruptions. They are a most important and integrated element in about as perfect an entertainment as the most fastidious playgoer could demand…. A new landmark in the genre fathered by Rodgers and Hammerstein. A terrific show!”5
My Fair Lady. George Bernard Shaw and his puppets, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews (1956). © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
Many early critics noted the skill and appropriateness of the adaptation from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912). For Daily News reviewer John Chapman, Lerner and Loewe “have written much the way Shaw must have done had he been a musician instead of a music critic.”6 Hawkins wrote that “the famed Pygmalion has been used with such artfulness and taste, such vigorous reverence, that it springs freshly to life all over again.”7 And even though Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times added the somewhat condescending “basic observation” that “Shaw’s crackling mind is still the genius of My Fair Lady,” he concluded his rave of this “wonderful show” by endorsing the work on its own merits: “To Shaw’s agile intelligence it adds the warmth, loveliness, and excitement of a memorable theatre frolic.”8
Lerner (1918–1986) and Loewe (1901–1988) met fortuitously at New York’s Lambs Club in 1942. Before he began to match wits with Loewe, Lerner’s marginal writing experience had consisted of lyrics to two Hasty Pudding musicals at Harvard and a few radio scripts. Shortly after their meeting Loewe asked Lerner to help revise Great Lady, a musical that had previously met its rapid Broadway demise in 1938. The team inauspiciously inaugurated their Broadway collaboration with two now-forgotten flops, What’s Up? (1943) and The Day before Spring (1945).
Documentation for the years before Loewe arrived in the United States in 1924 is sporadic and unreliable, and most of the frequently circulated “facts” about the European years—for example, that Loewe studied with Weill’s teacher, Ferruccio Busoni—were circulated by Loewe himself and cannot be independently confirmed. Sources even disagree about the year and city of his birth, and the most reliable fact about his early years is that his father was the famous singer Edmund Loewe, who debuted as Prince Danilo in the Berlin production of Lehár’s The Merry Widow and performed the lead in Oscar Straus’s first and only Shaw adaptation, The Chocolate Soldier.9
As Loewe would have us believe, young Fritz was a child prodigy who began to compose at the age of seven and who at age thirteen became the youngest pianist to have appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic. None of this can be verified. Lerner and Loewe biographer Gene Lees also questions Loewe’s frequently reported claim to have written a song, “Katrina,” that managed to sell two million copies.10 Loewe’s early years in America remain similarly obscure. After a decade of often extremely odd jobs, including professional boxing, gold prospecting, delivering mail on horseback, and cow punching, Loewe broke into show business when one of his songs was interpolated in the nonmusical Petticoat Fever by operetta star Dennis King. Another Loewe song was interpolated in The Illustrators Show (1936).11 The Great Lady fiasco (twenty performances) occurred two years later.
After their early Broadway failures, Lerner and Loewe produced their first successful Rodgers and Hammerstein–type musical on their third Broadway try, Brigadoon (1947), a romantic tale of a Scottish village that awakens from a deep sleep once every hundred years. By the end of the musical, the town offers a permanent home to a formerly jaded American who discovers the meaning of life and love (and some effective ersatz-Scottish music) within its timeless borders. The following year Lerner wrote the book and lyrics for the first of many musicals without Loewe, the modestly successful and rarely revived avant-garde “concept musical” Love Life (with music by Weill). Lerner and Loewe’s next collaboration, the occasionally revived Paint Your Wagon (1951) was less than a hit on its first run. Also in 1951 Lerner without Loewe wrote the Academy Award–winning screenplay for An American in Paris, which featured the music and lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin. By 1952 Lerner, reunited with Loewe, was ready to tackle Shaw.
My Fair Lady and Pygmalion
The Genesis
It may seem inevitable that someone would have set Pygmalion, especially when considering the apparent ease with which Lerner and Loewe adapted Shaw’s famous play for the musical stage. In fact, much conspired against any musical setting of a Shaw play for the last forty years of the transplanted Irishman’s long and productive life. The main obstacle until Shaw’s death in 1950 was the playwright himself, who, after enduring what he considered to be a travesty of Arms and the Man in Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier (1910), wrote to Theatre Guild producer Theresa Helburn in 1939 that “nothing will ever induce me to allow any other play of mine to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music except its own.”12 As early as 1921, seven years after the English premiere of his play, Shaw aggressively thwarted an attempt by Lehár to secure the rights to Pygmalion: “a Pygmalion operetta is quite out of the question.”13 As late as 1948 Shaw was rejecting offers to musicalize Pygmalion, and in response to a request from Gertrude Lawrence (the original heroine of Lady in the Dark) he offered his last word on the subject: “My decision as to Pygmalion is final: let me hear no more about it. This is final.”14
Much of our information on the genesis of My Fair Lady comes from Lerner’s engagingly written autobiography, The Street Where I Live (1978), more than one hundred pages of which are devoted to the compositional genesis, casting, and production history of their Shaw adaptation.15 Additionally, Loewe’s holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts in the Music Division of the Library of Congress offer a fascinating glimpse into some later details of the compositional process of the songs.
From Lerner we learn that after two or three weeks of intensive discussion and planning in 1952 the team’s first tussle with the musicalization of Shaw’s play had produced only discouragement. Part of the problem was that the reverence Lerner and Loewe held for Shaw’s play precluded a drastic overhaul.
Equally problematic, their respect for the Rodgers and Hammerstein model initially prompted Lerner and Loewe to find an appropriate place for a choral ensemble as well as a secondary love story. While a chorus could be contrived with relative ease, it was more difficult to get around the second problem: Shaw’s play “had one story and one story only,” and the central plot of Pygmalion, “although Shaw called it a romance, is a non-love story.”16 In a chance meeting with Hammerstein, the great librettist-lyricist told Lerner, “It can’t be done…. Dick [Rodgers] and I worked on it for over a year and gave it up.”17
Lerner and Loewe returned to their adaptation of Shaw two years later optimistic that a Shavian musical would be possible. As Lerner explains:
By 1954 it no longer seemed essential that a musical have a subplot, nor that there be an ever-present ensemble filling the air with high C’s and flying limbs. In other words, some of the obstacles that had stood in the way of converting Pygmalion into a musical had simply been removed by a changing style…. As Fritz and I talked and talked, we gradually began to realize that the way to convert Pygmalion to a musical did not require the addition of any new characters…. We could do Pygmalion simply by doing Pygmalion following the screenplay [of the 1938 film as altered by director Gabriel Pascal] more than the [stage] play and adding the action that took place between the acts of the play.18
Instead of placing Higgins as a professor of phonetics in a university setting in order to generate the need for a chorus of students, Professor Higgins used his home as his laboratory and a chorus composed of his servants now sufficed. Since the move from a tea party at the home of Higgins’s mother to the Ascot races provided the opportunity for a second chorus, it seemed unnecessary to insert a third chorus at the Embassy Ball. Although they did not invent any characters, Lerner and Loewe did provide a variation of a Rodgers and Hammerstein–type subplot by expanding the role of Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s father.19 Despite these changes and other omissions and insertions that alter the tone and meaning of Shaw’s play, Lerner’s libretto follows much of the Pygmalion text with remarkable tenacity. In contrast to any of the adaptations considered here, Lerner and Loewe’s libretto leaves long stretches of dialogue virtually unchanged.
By November 1954 Lerner and Loewe had completed five songs for their new musical. Two of these, “The Ascot Gavotte” and “Just You Wait,” would eventually appear in the show. Another song intended for Eliza, “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” would be partially salvaged in the Embassy Ball music and recycled in the film Gigi (1958).20 Also completed by November 1954 were two songs intended for Higgins, “Please Don’t Marry Me,” the “first attempt to dramatize Higgins’s misogyny,” and “Lady Liza,” the first of several attempts to find a song in which Higgins would encourage a demoralized Eliza to attend the Embassy Ball.21 Rex Harrison, the Higgins of choice from the outset, vigorously rejected both of these songs, and they quickly vanished. The casting of Harrison, the actor most often credited with introducing a new kind of talk-sing, was of course a crucial decision that affected the musical characteristics of future Higgins songs.22 A second try at “Please Don’t Marry Me” followed in 1955 and resulted in the now familiar “I’m an Ordinary Man.” “Come to the Ball” replaced “Lady Liza” and stayed in the show until opening night. Lerner summarizes the compositional progress of their developing show: “By mid-February [1955] we left London with the Shaw rights in one hand, commitments from Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, and Cecil Beaton [costumes] in the other, two less songs than we had arrived with [“Please Don’t Marry Me” and “Lady Liza”] and a year’s work ahead of us.”23
Earlier Lerner reported that a winter’s journey around the frigid Covent Garden had yielded the title and melody of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.” The genesis of Eliza’s first song demonstrates the team’s usual pattern: title, tune, and, after excruciating procrastination and writer’s block, a lyric.24 The lyricist details the agony of creation for “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” a process that took Loewe “one afternoon” and Lerner weeks of delay and psychological trauma before he could even produce a word. Six weeks “after a successful tour around the neighborhood with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’” they completed Higgins’s opening pair of songs, “Why Can’t the English?” and “I’m an Ordinary Man.”25 These are the last songs that Lerner mentions before rehearsals began in January 1956.
Lerner’s chronology accounts for all but four My Fair Lady songs: “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “The Servants’ Chorus,” “Promenade,” and “Without You.” All Lerner has to say about “With a Little Bit of Luck” is that it was written for Holloway sometime before rehearsals.26 But although Lerner’s autobiography provides no additional chronological information about the remaining three songs, we are not reduced to idle speculation concerning two of these. On musical evidence it is apparent that the “Introduction to Promenade” was adapted from “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” one of the earliest songs drafted for the show.27 It will also be observed shortly that the principal melody of “Without You” is partially derived from Higgins’s “I’m an Ordinary Man,” completed nearly a year before rehearsals.28 Loewe’s holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts of My Fair Lady songs verify Lerner’s remark that this last-mentioned song underwent “one or two false starts.”29 Harrison described one of these as “inferior Noël Coward.”30 (In other differences with the published vocal score, the holograph of “You Did It” contains a shortened introduction and a considerable amount of additional but mostly repetitive material.)31
Of great importance for the peformance style of Higgins’s role was the decision to allow the professor to talk his way into a song or a new phrase of a song. In “I’m an Ordinary Man,” “A Hymn to Him,” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” audiences have long been accustomed to hear Higgins speak lines that are underscored by orchestral melody; the pitches are usually indicated in the vocal part by X’s, recalling the notation of Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire. The first of many examples of this occurs at the beginning of “I’m an Ordinary Man.” This move from song to speech probably occurred during the course of rehearsals. In any event, the holograph scores almost invariably indicate that these passages were originally meant to be sung.32
A New Happy Ending
In their most significant departure from their source Lerner and Loewe altered Shaw’s ending to allow a romantic resolution between Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. Shaw strenuously argued against this Cinderella interpretation, but he would live to regret that his original concluding lines in 1912 allow the possibility that Eliza, who has metamorphosed into “a tower of strength, a consort battleship,” will return to live with Higgins and Pickering as an independent woman, one of “three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.”33 While in his original text Shaw expresses Higgins’s confidence that Eliza will return with the requested shopping list, for the next forty years the playwright would quixotically try to establish his unwavering intention that Higgins and Eliza would never marry.34 Here are the final lines of Shaw’s play:
MRS. HIGGINS: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and glove.
HIGGINS: (sunnily) Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy ’em all right enough. Goodbye.
(They kiss. MRS. HIGGINS runs out. HIGGINS, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.)
Despite Shaw’s unequivocal interpretation—and long before Pascal’s Pygmalion film in 1938 or the My Fair Lady musical in 1956—the original Higgins, Beerbohm Tree, had already taken liberties that would distort the play beyond Shaw’s tolerance. In reporting on the 1914 London premiere to his wife Charlotte, Shaw wrote: “For the last two acts I writhed in hell…. The last thing I saw as I left the house was Higgins shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo.”35 Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom S
haw created the role of Eliza, urged the playwright to attend another performance “soon—or you’ll not recognize your play.”36
When he summoned enough courage to attend the hundredth performance, Shaw was appalled to discover that “in the brief interval between the end of the play and fall of the curtain, the amorous Higgins threw flowers at Eliza (and with them Shaw’s instructions far out of sight).”37 To make explicit what he had perhaps naively assumed would be understood, Shaw published a sequel to Pygmalion in 1916, in which he explained in detail why Eliza and Higgins could not and should not be considered as potential romantic partners.
Considering his strong ideas on the subject, it is surprising that Shaw permitted Pascal to further alter the ending (and many other parts) of Shaw’s original screenplay for the 1938 Pygmalion film in order to create the impression that Higgins and Eliza would in fact unite. Perhaps Shaw was unaware that Pascal had actually filmed two other endings, including Shaw’s. In 1941, Penguin Books published a version of Shaw’s screenplay, which included reworked versions of five film scenes that were not part of the original play:
1. Eliza getting in a taxi and returning to her lodgings at the end of act I;
2. Higgins’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, giving Eliza a bath in the middle of act II;
3. Eliza’s lessons with Higgins at the end of act II;
4. The Embassy Ball at the end of act III (this scene is based on the Embassy Ball in the film—another Cinderella image—that replaced the ambassador’s garden party, dinner, and opera that took place offstage in the play);
5. Eliza’s meeting with Freddy when she leaves Higgins’s residence at the end of act IV.
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 34
