Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) (37 page)

My Fair Lady
was unquestionably the highpoint of the Lerner and Loewe relationship, both artistically and commercially. Yet even if they were not as popular, the experience of writing the earlier shows was crucial to the composer and lyricist’s development. For one thing, the storylines of their four previous Broadway musicals—
What’s Up?
(1943),
The Day Before Spring
(1945),
Brigadoon
(1947), and
Paint Your Wagon
(1951)—were broadly original, rather than adaptations of existing material. While the decision to set an established classic may partly explain the much greater success of
My Fair Lady
(which was their only show to date unhampered by a problematic book), writing their earlier musicals from scratch gave them the freedom to experiment with structure. For instance, they used extensive ballet sequences in both
What’s Up?
(directed and choreographed by the ballet legend George Balanchine) and
The Day Before Spring
(choreographed by the British ballet dancer Antony Tudor) to manipulate the narrative through dance. So although the ballet was ultimately cut from
My Fair Lady
, its initial inclusion followed a pattern established in their early works.

The Day Before Spring
was an important experience in other ways, too. The script, though flawed because of some peculiar moments of fantasy and perhaps a lack of action and excitement, was witty and mature in subject matter, just as
Fair Lady
was later to be. The story deals with the rekindling of an old romance during a college reunion, when a woman discovers that her former love has written a novel about her in the ten-year interim, and considers eloping with him and leaving her husband—comparatively risqué for a musical of this period. Musically, Loewe learned much from writing songs in contrasting styles. In particular, the Latin flair of “God’s Green World” would
later reap dividends in “The Rain in Spain” and “Show Me,” while the title number and “You Haven’t Changed at All” reveal Loewe’s use of sophisticated chromatic movement to add interest and piquancy to romantic ballads.
¹
Again, this is something that characterizes many of his later songs. The first-act finale has a different complexity, namely a fluid sequence of contrasting sections of music that reflects its intricate verse structure. The protagonist, Katherine, has to make up her mind—should she run off with her former love or stay with her husband?—so she asks statues of Plato, Voltaire, and Freud (who come to life) for their advice. They each answer differently, with individually-characterized music to match, and Loewe binds it all together in a large-scale structure based on tonal and thematic relationships. This model took on a more familiar form in
My Fair Lady
as “You Did It,” the concerted number that opens the second act. The other important aspect of
The Day Before Spring
is that it contains music that was later reused—including sections of both the title song from
Gigi
and “On the Street Where You Live.”
²

A big step forward was taken with
Brigadoon
. There is a noticeable coherence about the piece, and the music hangs together more convincingly: Loewe learned how to create a kind of musical
tinta
(a unifying “color”) so that the individual numbers had elements in common that gave them coherence. The use of dotted rhythms in many of the songs evokes Scotland, in an allusion to the folk music of the country, and thereby gives them stylistic unity. There are also several important dances and a strong role for the chorus, and in “The Chase” Lerner and Loewe evolved an extensive number that propels the action forward compellingly. It is an altogether more sophisticatedly conceived work, even if its atmosphere is far from sophisticated. Similar traits are found in
Paint Your Wagon
(1951), with gestures signifying the Wild West giving the score its unique character, and easily a third of the music consisted of dances. Both musicals are complex in construction, and show a composer and lyricist who knew what they were doing. These were the first two of their Broadway shows to be filmed, the first two to be revived, and the first containing a handful of songs that became standards.
³

The problem was that neither show really gave Loewe the opportunity to compose the more lavish, glamorous music with which he was to excel in their next three musicals (
My Fair Lady, Gigi,
and
Camelot
). Similarly, Lerner’s keenly romantic brand of poetry, coupled with a wordy sophistication, was not as much at home in the Scottish heather of
Brigadoon
or the plain desert of
Paint Your Wagon
as it would subsequently be when he turned to established sources of European literature for his three masterpieces with Loewe. He later commented that after
The Day Before Spring
, “I got off the track. Both
Brigadoon
and
Paint Your Wagon
were much more along the
Oklahoma[!]
road
than the one I had set out on, and I was determined somehow to find my way back. So I, too, was as drawn to
Pygmalion
as Fritz was.”
⁴
Fair Lady
was a significant moment in the Lerner and Loewe collaboration, after years of never quite achieving the impact of certain of their rivals—notably Rodgers and Hammerstein.

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