Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) (38 page)

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. Since
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.

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 their 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.

The flip side is that it is less obvious to read
My Fair Lady
in the context of American society because of its English setting, and in this respect it is
completely unlike many of the other shows of the period. Contrasts between the pastoral and the urban in
Oklahoma!
(1943), the representation of the Wild West in
Annie Get Your Gun
(1946), the depiction of trade unions in
The Pajama Game
(1954), baseball in
Damn Yankees
(1955), McCarthyism in
Candide
(1956), ethnic clashes in
West Side Story
(1957), small-town America in
The Music Man
(1957), the assimilation of Asian-Americans in
Flower Drum Song
(1958), and the dilution of Jewish religious traditions in
Fiddler on the Roof
(1964) are all examples of how the Broadway musical engaged directly with American society. Several of Lerner and Loewe’s other shows can be read in similar ways, too, be it the idolizing of an untouched historico-pastoral idyll by urban Americans in
Brigadoon
, the gold rush in
Paint Your Wagon,
or the posthumous association of the story of
Camelot
with the rise and fall of the John F. Kennedy administration.

However,
My Fair Lady
pursues a more latent “American” agenda in the form of the character of Eliza Doolittle. Like other Broadway classics, it has optimism at its centre. Whether during the boom of the 1920s (Gershwin’s
Girl Crazy
), the Depression of the 1930s (Porter’s
Anything Goes
), the Second World War (Berlin’s
This is the Army
), or the Cold War (Porter’s
Silk Stockings
), Broadway musicals had often provided either a reflection of the good times they were written in or a flicker of hope to overcome the bad times; in a broad sense, songs such as “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Carousel
or “Somewhere” from Bernstein and Sondheim’s
West Side Story
seem to epitomize much of what musicals are about. Eliza Doolittle is the ultimate Broadway musical heroine, therefore, because from start to finish she embodies the triumph of aspiration as well as being a representative of feminism, women’s suffrage, and social mobility—themes which chime with aspects of the American Dream such as getting rich, getting on in the world, and the equality of the sexes. Eliza’s first song, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?,” makes this connection clear at once, showing us that she wants to be warm and comfortable. Her line “I want to be a lady in a flower shop, ’stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road” (24), initially representing her goal in life, functions as a prominent leitmotif in the show because it is repeated on the gramophone record of Eliza’s voice that Higgins plays in the final scene (155). Higgins also refers to this ambition in act 2 during the great clash between the characters, when he says, “What about that old idea of a florist’s shop?” (111).
²⁷
She also remains a strong character in act 2, singing of her independence in “Without You” and demanding something more concrete than empty promises in “Show Me.” Thus the broader atmosphere is very much in keeping with other Broadway musicals of the period.