Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (124 page)

18
. Lerner,
The Street Where I Live
, 43–44.

19
. In contrast to the Rodgers and Hammerstein prototype, in which the secondary characters show some emotional or comic bond and sing to or about one another,
My Fair Lady
audiences never actually meet Doolittle’s bride.

20
. “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” would be abandoned in the Broadway version of
Gigi
(1973).

21
. Lerner,
The Street Where I Live
, 50. Before it became
My Fair Lady
,
Lady Liza
was the show’s working title.

22
. Harrison attributed his idiosyncratic combination of speaking and singing to conductor Bill Low. According to Harrison, Low informed him that “there is such a thing as talking on pitch—using only those notes that you want to use, picking them out of the score, sometimes more, sometimes less. For the rest of the time, concentrate on staying on pitch, even though you’re only speaking.” Harrison,
Rex: An Autobiography
, 108.

23
. Lerner,
The Street Where I Live
, 65. Harrison places his meeting with Lerner, Loewe, and their lawyer, Herman Levin, several months later “in the summer of 1955 … in the middle of the London run of
Bell, Book and Candle
.” Harrison,
Rex: An Autobiography
, 106.

24
. Lyricist-composers Porter and Loesser similarly gave their songs a title before composing a tune. Lerner also shared the frustrations suffered by fellow lyricist-librettist Hammerstein. While falling somewhat short of Rodgers’s legendary speed (e.g., “Bali Ha’i” allegedly in five minutes, “Happy Talk” in twenty), the comparative ease and rapidity with which Loewe composed melodies was a fate that Lerner too had to endure.

25
. Lerner,
The Street Where I Live
, 70.

26
. Lerner places the creation of “The Rain in Spain,” his one “unexpected visitation from the muses,” during a spontaneous ten-minute period after an audition (Ibid., 87). Harrison contradicts Lerner when he recalls hearing “The Rain in Spain” along with “Lady Liza” and “Please Don’t Marry Me” at his initial London meeting with Lerner, Loewe, and Levin. Harrison,
Rex: An Autobiography
, 107.

27
. Just as “Say a Prayer” would return two years later in the film
Gigi
, the main theme of “Promenade” would return in both the film and subsequent stage versions of this show as “She Is Not Thinking of Me.”

28
. The chronology of “The Servants’ Chorus” must remain conjectural. The most likely hypothesis is that it followed the inception of “The Rain in Spain” during rehearsals. The fact that the lyrics were added in pen in the Library of Congress holograph score suggests, but does not confirm, that they were a late addition.

29
. Lerner,
The Street Where I Live
, 70.

30
. Ibid., 79. The earlier version of “Why Can’t the English?,” the lyrics of which Lerner discusses in his autobiography (Ibid., 79–80), can be found on the reverse sides of three song holographs in the Loewe Collection of the Library of Congress: “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Show Me,” and “On the Street Where She Lives” (original title). Larry Stempel notes their presence and their “Coward touch,” as exemplified in “Mad Dogs and Englishman,” in the first two of these holograph scores. See Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play Expands,” 166, note 18.

31
. The holograph does not display a text over the underscoring as found on the vocal score (152 and 159) or the right-hand accompaniment figure that is prominently featured a little later (160 and 161). Also in the holograph the word “aren’” (to rhyme with “foreign”) appears as “aren’t.”

32
. A complete list for the spoken passages in the three mentioned Higgins songs follows: “I’m an Ordinary Man” (“I’m an ordinary man,” “But let a …” [all three times], “I’m a very gentle man,” and “I’m a quiet-living man”) [the final spoken “Let a woman in your life” does not appear on the holograph in any form]; “A Hymn to Him” (“What in all of Heaven could have prompted her to …” [the next word “go” is sung] and “Why can’t a …” [the next word “woman” is sung]; and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“I can see her now,” “In a …,” and “I’m a most forgiving man”).

Despite this increased tendency to replace song with speech-song, the holograph indicates that some passages were originally spoken. For example: “A Hymn to Him” (“Why can’t a woman be like that?,” “Why can’t a woman be like you?,” and “Why can’t a woman be like us?”); and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“Damn!! Damn!! Damn!! Damn!!” and “I’ve grown accustomed to her face!” at the beginning of the song, and later the “quasi recitative” “Poor Eliza! How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful!”). It should also be noted that the holograph of the opening three syllables in Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “The Lord a-,” indicates three sung pitches, a rising scale G-A-B leading to a C on “-bove.”

33
.
George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion/Alan Jay Lerner My Fair Lady
(New York: Signet, 1975), 88.

34
. As late as February 23, 1948, ten years after the film version of
Pygmalion
, Shaw would write, “I absolutely forbid the Campbell interpolation [‘What size’] or any suggestion that the middle-aged bully and the girl of eighteen are lovers.” Laurence, ed.,
Collected Letters 1926–1950
, 815.

35
. Laurence, ed.,
Collected Letters 1911–1925
, 227.

36
. Michael Holroyd,
Bernard Shaw, Volume II, 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power
(New York: Random House, 1989), 339.

37
. Ibid., 340.

38
. Donald P. Costello,
The Serpent’s Eye: Shaw and the Cinema
. Costello discusses each of the fourteen scenes that appear in the film but not its screenplay; he also offers a useful appendix, “From Play to Screen Play to Sound Track: A Textual Comparison of Three Versions of Act V of Shaw’s Pygmalion.”

39
. Costello,
The Serpent’s Eye
, 187–88.

40
. Laurence, ed.,
Collected Letters 1926–1950
, 532–33.

41
.
Pygmalion/My Fair Lady
, 93–94. The remaining quotations in this paragraph can be found on p. 94.

42
. Costello,
The Serpent’s Eye
, 76.

43
. Considering its indebtedness to the Pascal film, it is not surprising that on the title page of the
My Fair Lady
vocal score, Lerner and Loewe were requested to include the phrase “adapted from Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ produced on the screen by Gabriel Pascal,” and that Pascal would receive 1 percent of the
My Fair Lady
royalties. Costello,
The Serpent’s Eye
, 68.

44
. The exercises themselves appeared in the film (but not the published screenplay): “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” for vowels and “in Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen” for aspirate
h
’s. See the stage photograph of this latter exercise on p. 271 and its counterpart in the film on p. 323.

45
.
Pygmalion/My Fair Lady
, 140.

46
. The opening notes of Loewe’s melody are identical to the opening of Brahms’s intermezzo for piano in C
minor, op. 117, no. 3. On the subject of musical quotation, Tosca’s “Non la sospiri la nostra casetta” in act I of her opera bears an uncanny melodic resemblance to Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck.” In contrast to Blitzstein’s and Bernstein’s significant classical borrowings, neither of these possible
My Fair Lady
borrowings was apparently chosen to make a dramatic point.

47
. Joseph P. Swain,
The Broadway Musical
, 196.

48
. Ibid., 199.

49
. More remote and perhaps unintentional are the melodic correspondences between the opening A sections of “On the Street Where You Live” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” In any event, it makes sense that a dramatically transformed Higgins would sing a variation of Freddy’s lovesick tune. After all, Higgins could easily have heard Freddy’s song on any number of the many occasions Eliza’s would-be suitor performed it under his window. Although the causes are less dramatically explicable, it is also arguable that “On the Street Where You Live” is melodically derived from “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

50
. It might be recalled that the rhythm of “Get Me to the Church on Time” was anticipated in the middle portion of “Just You Wait,” where it was preceded by an upbeat.

51
. The full text of “Come to the Ball” is located in Benny Green, ed.,
A Hymn to Him: The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner
, 109–10. Loewe’s holograph score can be found in folder 15 of the Loewe Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

52
. Lerner,
The Street Where I Live
, 88–89.

53
. Ibid., 106.

54
. Ibid., 106–7. Lerner went on to explain how “quite unwittingly, the new scene also solved our one major costume problem.” In contrast to the original ball scene when Eliza’s elegant gown was unable to stand out from the splendor of the other gowns, “in the new scene she appeared at the top of the stairs in Higgins’ house in her ball gown, and the audience broke into applause.” Ibid., 108.

55
. The original text of “On the Street Where You Live” appears in Green, ed.,
A Hymn to Him
, 96. Lerner commented on and performed the opening night version of this song in “An Evening with Alan Jay Lerner” at the 92nd Street Y, December 12, 1971 (Book-of-the-Month Records 70–524; re-released on DRG 5175 [1977])

56
. Shaw introduces Freddy and his ineffectual attempts to hail a cab as well as his sister Clara in act I; Lerner and Loewe do not present Freddy until Ascot, and they drop the role of Clara altogether.

57
. Lehman Engel,
Words with Music
, 116. All quotations in this and the following paragraph can be found on p. 116.

58
. In contrast to Engel, Lerner described “the flagrantly romantic lyric that kept edging on the absurd” as “exactly right for the character.” Lerner,
The Street Where I Live
, 106.

59
. Harold Bloom, ed.,
George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
(New York: Chelsea House, 1988), vii and 1–10.

60
. The demise of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s
Porgy
, Sidney Howard’s
They Knew What They Wanted
, and Ferenc Molnár’s
Liliom
, and their displacement by
Porgy and Bess, The Most Happy Fella
, and
Carousel
has been accepted with equanimity by theater audiences and producers. Fortunately, Shakespeare’s
The Taming of the Shrew
and
Romeo and Juliet
have so far been spared a similar fate.

61
.
Pygmalion/My Fair Lady
, 43. The original Mrs. Patrick Campbell was a youthful forty-eight at the time she introduced the role of Eliza.

62
. Engel,
Words with Music
, 87.

63
. For all of Lerner’s shows after
Camelot
see Benny Green, ed.,
A Hymn to Him
for Lerner’s lyrics, and, in the case of
My Man Godfrey
, his outline and scenario.

1
. In his autobiography Harold Prince acknowledged that he closed the show six months prematurely. Harold Prince,
Contradictions
, 39–40.

2
.
West Side Story
was surpassed in first-run longevity by twenty-two shows that premiered before 1960 (see “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959 and 1920–2008 in the online website), including several concurrent hits that had not yet completed their initial runs:
Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing
, and, of course,
My Fair Lady
, which opened the year before. Meredith Willson’s
The Music Man
, which first paraded on Broadway two months after
West Side Story
and eventually ran for 1,375 performances, also eclipsed the
Romeo and Juliet
adaptation when it won the Tony for best musical of 1957. The London version of
West Side Story
was voted the Best Musical of the Year 1960. If one were to take into account the return engagement that directly followed
West Side Story
’s tour, however, its place in the 1920–1959 list would rise to fourteenth and the 985 performance total would move
West Side Story
up to eighth place on the Broadway scoreboard for the decade, less than 100 performances below
Pajama Game
and
Damn Yankees
in sixth and seventh position, respectively. The point is that despite the difficulty of raising the needed $350,000, despite the cast of virtual unknowns, despite the fact that about a hundred people
walked out night after night in response to its grim subject matter,
West Side Story
was a hit.