Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies)

by McHugh, Dominic

  Just as Lerner and Loewe’s experiences with their early shows informed their composition of My Fair Lady, so too did the work of their contemporaries have an impact on the show. From 1943 on, the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II was the leading force on Broadway. The success of Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), and The King and I (1951) was matched with an acute business sense on the part of both composer and lyricist that helped them to control every aspect of their productions, making them a legendary partnership, which had never before and, arguably, has never since been matched. It is in the context of these shows that My Fair Lady tends to have been read, and rightly so, up to a point.

  But the comparisons between My Fair Lady and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals tend to rob Lerner and Loewe of some of their individuality. This was the case from the very beginning. In his review of the opening night of the show on Broadway, Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror wrote that it was “a new landmark in the genre fathered by Rodgers and Hammerstein.”5 Immediately, this put the show under the shadow of the earlier team’s output. Coleman went on to specify the elements of Fair Lady that particularly owed themselves to the supposed “Rodgers and Hammerstein model”: “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.” This attitude has continued in the more recent secondary literature on Lerner and Loewe. For instance, Scott McMillin says that “the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein … is also the world of Lerner and Loewe.”6 Similarly, Thomas L. Riis and Ann Sears write that My Fair Lady has elements in common with “all the important Rodgers and Hammerstein shows” and uses “the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula.”7 The problem here is not that these and other writers are wrong, but that they capitulate to the canonic pull of Rodgers and Hammerstein rather than assessing the show on its own merit.

  It is not just the shadow of Rodgers and Hammerstein that has been cast over the reception of My Fair Lady: that of George Bernard Shaw also continues to cloud the extent to which Lerner and Loewe are given credit for their work. The Shavian connection promotes an element of snobbery in the show’s public profile, so that it has been seen as a cut above the average musical comedy simply because of its source material. In part, this has done My Fair Lady a service because it has given it the status of something almost approaching high culture, but it is also the reason why the perception that Shaw remains the brains behind the show first emerged. It is also perhaps the case that since productions of Pygmalion tend to resemble My Fair Lady in a broad sense—with period costumes and a study and library set, for instance—people might think that they have seen it all before, without initially realizing the rigorous job done by Lerner and Loewe in reworking the play on every level. This notion was cleverly anticipated by Al Hirschfeld in his now-iconic caricature of the show, which featured on the playbills and cast album. This image is associated more than any other with My Fair Lady. Not only is Higgins portrayed as the puppeteer, manipulating Eliza’s every move, but Shaw himself is in charge of proceedings in the clouds, rising above as the master magician, as it were. Strikingly absent from the image are Lerner and Loewe, and the question Hirschfeld might be asking is, whose strings is Shaw really pulling—Higgins’s and Eliza’s or Lerner’s and Loewe’s?

  Likewise, most of the reviews of the opening night on Broadway focused strongly on the way in which Lerner and Loewe had adapted Pygmalion for the musical stage (see chap. 7). Often, there is a tension between wanting to apologize for Lerner and Loewe’s near-sacrilege in taking on the task in the first place and at the same time awarding Fair Lady extra kudos for its association with Shaw. Then again, perhaps the fact that the show strove to adapt Shaw’s play as a piece of music theater rather than creating a brash piece of entertainment helped audiences to engage closely with the material. My Fair Lady is like other shows of its day in being a so-called book musical, with a strong storyline and script that give rise to plot-clinching songs and dances, but the way in which the book has achieved as legendary a status as the score has always made it stand out. Unusually for a musical, the script has never been out of print, and it has even been published in a volume side by side with Pygmalion—an especially singular move to bring a script of a musical and its source material together—as well as in an inexpensive paperback edition for popular use.8

  The type of theater it constitutes has always struck critics and audiences as particularly absorbing. Brooks Atkinson’s first-night review, for instance, mentions that “My Fair Lady is staged dramatically on a civilized plane. Probably for the first time in history a typical musical comedy audience finds itself absorbed in the art of pronunciation and passionately involved in the proper speaking of ‘pain’, ‘rain’ and ‘Spain.’”9 The Newark Evening News reported that “The gaily perceptive Shavian fable of a Cockney flower vendor’s transition into a lady of articulate charm by a bemused mentor of phonetics loses none of its classical zest in this retelling,” a comment that promotes most avidly the idea that the articulate power of Pygmalion is maintained in My Fair Lady.10 The reviewer in Newsweek claimed that “Shaw’s pervasively witty malice guides their totality [i.e., the combined talent of Lerner, Loewe, Smith, and Beaton] toward something that is very close to great theater,” while Time magazine said that the musical retains “all of Shaw’s hardy perennial bloom.”11 More recently, Edward Jablonski, Stephen Citron, Geoffrey Block, and Scott McMillin have also focused strongly on the Shavian element of the show, demonstrating the irresistible pull of the very British Pygmalion on the reception of My Fair Lady.12

  Julie Andrews (Eliza) and Rex Harrison (Higgins) in the final scene from My Fair Lady (Photofest)

  The third leading trend in the literature on the show concerns genre. In spite of opening on Broadway and being the product of a composer and lyricist whose careers centered around American musical theater, My Fair Lady has too often been interpreted as an operetta rather than a musical. Again, Lerner and Loewe are denied some credit for the originality of their work for this reason. It goes without saying that generic labels involve generalization and tend to homogenize works into groups rather than revealing their unique characteristics. But in the case of My Fair Lady the description “operetta” seems to have a pejorative connotation, loosely evoking the late-nineteenth-century Vienna of the Strauss family rather than 1950s Broadway. Perhaps the most notable writer to discuss My Fair Lady in this light is Richard Traubner, who devotes a chapter of his book Operetta: A Theatrical History to Broadway musicals. His attitude toward Broadway is that musicals “are very apparently and decisively operettas, though critics do not care to admit that they are. … [S]hows like Oklahoma!, Brigadoon, The King and I, West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Camelot are all to varying degrees romantic operettas.”13 More specifically on My Fair Lady, he writes: “The collaboration of Alan Jay Lerner … and Frederick Loewe … has provided the Broadway stage with three of the greatest operettas of the postwar era, though none of them was so termed.”14 Other writers to take this line include Thomas L. Riis and Ann Sears, who write that “Loewe’s charming music … [is] redolent of the operetta of an earlier day”;15 Gervase Hughes, who includes Rodgers, Loesser, Bernstein, and Loewe in his book on operetta;16 and William Zinsser, who says that Lerner and Loewe “won’t be remembered for pushing the musical theater into new terrain … they were a throwback to the earlier generic team of Gilbert and Sullivan.” Zinsser also goes on to say that “Loewe was … a residual product of the nineteenth century; he could have written melodies for Gilbert.”17

  Yet the fact that there is no census on the point makes this “operetta” label problematic. Genre is a two-way process: it exists so that audiences can access a set of identifiers to which they can relate and so that writers can function within some kind of framework. But it is not meant to be constrictive. Sinc
e each audience member brings a different set of experiences to his or her viewpoint, the generic markers have to be strong for a work’s classification to be unambiguous. That might be the case with an action or horror movie, but much of My Fair Lady is so unlike anything else that it is easy to have sympathy with Ethan Mordden’s view of the piece as sui generis (“without genre”).18 Mostly, generic readings do not tell us very much about My Fair Lady, yet it is interesting to ask why commentators might want to pursue them. The broadest reason is actually complimentary to the show: relating it to long-established pieces makes it part of a stronger historical lineage. And this is often related to the fact that Frederick Loewe was born and raised in Germany, and was therefore culturally allied to both Western art music and operetta. He also had a background in writing German cabaret songs, several of which were published.19 Accounts of Loewe’s life tend to emphasize the fact that his father sang in operettas in Berlin, and the composer himself propagated tales that he studied with Ferruccio Busoni while in Europe, supposedly alongside Kurt Weill, although this particular claim raises some doubt.20 Loewe, a little like Weill, has always been regarded as slightly apart from his “American” colleagues. Lerner, too, has sometimes been connected with Europe more than America because of his British education, which is perhaps why Zinsser says that “Of all American lyricists, [he] was the nearest descendant of WS Gilbert; he could have written lyrics for Sir Arthur Sullivan.”21 But no specific example is given by Zinsser or any other writer making these assertions, and they ultimately tell us very little about the show or how it might be interpreted.

  Nor does the claim that the score in some way evokes the nineteenth century or early twentieth century really ring true; Loewe is subtler than that. Even if one does not entirely accept the piece as being “beyond genre,” there is surely too wide a range of generic markers to group the whole score under one umbrella. For instance, the dance-like elegance of “Why Can’t the English?” may have an air of the archaic about it, but this is clearly intended to reflect Higgins’s pomposity and arrogance: he is old-fashioned, and a stilted style is used to depict his arrogance. Likewise, Eliza’s “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” has moments of delicacy, but this is offset by the cockney roughness of the block chords that run through most of the number, not to mention the coarse all-male chorus. If anything, the “London musical” (for instance, Noel Gay’s Me and My Girl) is the type being evoked here. Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time” are a flagrant evocation of the music-hall background of Stanley Holloway, for whom the role was written.22 Again, the gentlemanly elegance of the verses of “I’m an Ordinary Man” is a result of Loewe’s gracefulness of line, and the loose, fluid structure of the song is sophisticated, but the dotted rhythms, thumb (tenor) line, and numerous chromatically modified chords are pure Broadway in their pedigree. Similar ingredients characterize “A Hymn to Him” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” and the short (twenty-bar) melody of the latter also signifies a freedom of form that put the composition firmly in the Broadway of the 1950s. The London-industrial East End brusqueness and characteristic Broadway tonic-dominant accompaniment of “Just You Wait” are also signs that the score is a long way from relying on the kind of musical language found in nineteenth-century operetta. “The Rain in Spain” and “Show Me” employ exotic, particularly Latin, styles of music that are very much in line with songs such as “Hernando’s Hideaway” from The Pajama Game and “Whatever Lola Wants” from Damn Yankees, two musicals that opened in the years closely preceding My Fair Lady and which are quintessentially American in style and subject matter. Even “I Could Have Danced All Night,” whose arpeggiated melody and relatively high tessitura require a performer of some vocal poise, has an unmistakable Broadway bounce and abandon.

  Where the show does venture into artier waters, there is always a reason for it. Loewe deliberately makes “The Ascot Gavotte” sound archaic and affected, to reflect the artifice of the aristocracy at the races. Similarly, “The Servants’ Chorus” is mannered and stiff in style to mirror the long, monotonous hours the servants have to endure as the clock ticks by during Eliza’s lessons. “The Embassy Waltz” is a diegetic piece of music playing in the background at the ball, so its reliance on the Viennese waltz idiom is entirely appropriate, and the use of a concerted structure for “You Did It” is undoubtedly meant to be read in quotation marks, matching the satire of the lyrics; Lerner later referred to it, tongue-in-cheek, as “a sort of Hyde Park Fledermaus.”23 He also revealed that the most lyrical part of it, when Pickering originally had more lines, was cut specifically because he “was singing too long” and said that the number “is a sort of ruse to prevent the audience from realizing that a lot of bad singing is going on.”24 This is the opposite of the aim of the traditional operatic largo concertante, in which all the characters are united precisely to show off the quality and power of the cast’s singing.

  In fact, the only song in the score that should be read through the lens of an operetta aria is “On the Street Where You Live.” Here, Freddy Eynsford-Hill sings of his love for Eliza in both musical and lyrical cliché, with several melodramatic vocal peaks in the melody and numerous romantic flights of fancy in the lyric, such as “All at once am I several stories high” and “Does enchantment pour out of every door?” The ways in which the number was heavily revised during the out-of-town tryouts show that Lerner and Loewe were striving for an amusing effect. We are meant to laugh at Freddy, and thereby realize why he is an impossible match for Eliza: his song is superficially pretty but a little dull and insipid, rather like himself. Therefore, the employment of an operetta style in this number is deliberate and fulfills its intended effect of making the singing Freddy an outsider, while the dismissal of the rest of the score as being stylistically anachronistic is too much of a generalization to be convincing.

  The three aspects of the show’s reception discussed earlier are interwoven: My Fair Lady has often been presented as beholden, whether to Rodgers and Hammerstein, to Shaw, or to the operetta genre, the implication being that it is not completely “original” and that the adaptation is passive. Yet there were several hundred changes to Shaw’s text, along with the addition of completely new episodes. More than this, the realignment of the Eliza-Higgins relationship allowed Lerner and Loewe to create a much more tantalizingly ambiguous situation than in Pygmalion. By using all the elements of musical theater to the full, they created something that is obviously quite separate and unique from the play.

  AN ACTIVE ADAPTATION

  As much as anything, the problem with writers’ inclination to read Fair Lady as subservient to various precedents has been one of formulation. It is still important to understand that Shaw and Rodgers and Hammerstein belong in the reception of My Fair Lady, but not in a way that denies Lerner and Loewe the full extent of their contribution. For instance, it is undeniable that Rodgers and Hammerstein brought in a more substantial type of musical theater with their collaboration, as Lerner himself was always ready to acknowledge.25 This particularly applies to the books (librettos), which are so much more than soufflés or mere star vehicles. The King and I is an especially important precursor. Like Fair Lady, it is based on a substantial literary source and takes several ideas from the screen adaptation of that book.26 More significantly, Rodgers and Hammerstein deal not only with a serious subject involving racial tensions and the death of the male protagonist but also with a central relationship that is not unlike that of Higgins and Eliza, both socially and emotionally. Anna Leonowens comes from England to become tutor to the offspring of the King of Siam, and the show charts a clash of cultures as Anna attempts to bring Western, democratic values to the pantheistic, feudal culture she finds in the East. This theme is propelled by a series of tautly woven interactions between the principal characters. What emerges is the attraction between the polygamous king and the prudish, Christian teacher. Consummation of this attraction is rendered impossible by thei
r situation—she does not approve of his moral code and seems to have embraced widowhood as a permanent way of life, while he would probably not accept a Western wife and would certainly not treat her as an equal, as Anna would demand—yet Rodgers and Hammerstein tantalize us with the possibility quite brilliantly. He is clearly attracted when she stands up to him, and the climax of the show is their second-act duet, “Shall We Dance?,” in which they unite in a grand polka. This drives the relationship to its most intimate, yet the number is interrupted and the next time they meet, the king is on his deathbed.

  Obviously, the tragic ending of The King and I is quite different to the final scene of My Fair Lady, but there is no doubt that this kind of musical helped pave the way for Lerner and Loewe. In both shows, the musical numbers and spoken dialogue have equal weight, rather than the dialogue merely filling in the spaces between the lyric moments; they both explore wider social issues as well as painting psychologically complex relationships in the foreground; and neither of them capitulates to the cliché of the romantic ending, albeit in different ways. We can also see the reinvention of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which is a complex monologue related to the models of the king’s “It’s a Puzzlement” in The King and I and, before that, Billy Bigelow’s iconic “Soliloquy” from Carousel (even if, in a broader sense, the idea is just as obviously borrowed from the big scena form of Italian opera). Still, it is the magnetic and complex relationship between Anna and the king which is the most important precedent for the portrayal of the connection between Higgins and Eliza.

  The work of composers other than Rodgers also helped. Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948), for instance, is a loose musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Although the play is liberally interpreted through the lens of a backstage musical, substantial portions of Shakespeare’s verse remain intact thanks to the show’s meta-theatrical format. While Kiss Me, Kate was far from being the first Broadway musical based on a Shakespeare play, Porter and his collaborators’ fearlessness in using large sections of a classic piece of English literature is an obvious precedent for the retention of big portions of Shaw’s period dialogue in Fair Lady. This meant that Lerner and Loewe could confidently write a dialogue-heavy show, and thereby create characters who were psychologically complex and could engage in a complicated relationship.