Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

leading role, and a positive review by Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. Despite all this, Donald Malcolm would ridicule the show’s tone in the New Yorker when he wrote that the village of Greenwillow “makes Glocca Morra look like a teeming slum” and a village where “Brigadoon could be the Latin Quarter.”54

The following year Loesser, again with Guys and Dolls librettist Burrows, succeeded in a more traditional urban musical comedy, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961). Unlike Tony in The Most Happy Fella, whose vulnerability and humanity, if not age, appearance, and intelligence, distinguishes him from other Broadway protagonists, the hero of Loesser’s next (and last) Broadway hit, J. Pierrepont Finch, is a boyish and aggressively charming Machiavelli who sings the show’s central love song to himself as he shaves before a mirror in the executive washroom (“I Believe in You”).

As its well-received 1995 Broadway revival starring Matthew Broderick further demonstrated, How to Succeed deserves recognition as one of the truly great satirical shows. In how many musicals can we laugh so uproariously about nepotism, blackmail, false pretenses, selfishness, and the worship of money, among many other human foibles. One example of Loesser’s comic originality and imagination in song is “Been a Long Day.” In this number, which might be described as a trio for narrator and twin soliloquies, a budding elevator romance is described in blow-by-blow detail through a third party before the future lovebirds manage to express their privately sung thoughts directly.

For his remaining eight years Loesser was unable to bring a work to Broadway. Pleasures and Palaces, a show about Catherine the Great, closed out of town in 1965, and Loesser died before he could fully complete and begin to try out Señor Discretion. But Loesser’s legacy remains large, and in his thirteen years on the Broadway stage he fared far better than Runyon’s 6–5 odds against. As Loesser’s revivals have shown, Broadway audiences, collapsing under the weight of musical spectacles, are reveling in the musicals of Loesser, the composer-lyricist who continues to give audiences and even musical and theater historians and critics so much to laugh (and cry) about and so little to sneeze at.

CHAPTER TWELVE

MY FAIR LADY

From Pygmalion to Cinderella

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