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

Documentation for the years before Loewe arrived in the United States in 1924 is sporadic and unreliable, and most of the frequently circulated “facts” about the European years—for example, that Loewe studied with Weill’s teacher, Ferruccio Busoni—were circulated by Loewe himself and cannot be independently confirmed. Sources even disagree about the year and city of his birth, and the most reliable fact about his early years is that his father was the famous singer Edmund Loewe, who debuted as Prince Danilo in the Berlin production of Lehár’s The Merry Widow and performed the lead in Oscar Straus’s first and only Shaw adaptation, The Chocolate Soldier.9

As Loewe would have us believe, young Fritz was a child prodigy who began to compose at the age of seven and who at age thirteen became the youngest pianist to have appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic. None of this can be verified. Lerner and Loewe biographer Gene Lees also questions Loewe’s frequently reported claim to have written a song, “Katrina,” that managed to sell two million copies.10 Loewe’s early years in America remain similarly obscure. After a decade of often extremely odd jobs, including professional boxing, gold prospecting, delivering mail on horseback, and cow punching, Loewe broke into show business when one of his songs was interpolated in the nonmusical Petticoat Fever by operetta star Dennis King. Another Loewe song was interpolated in The Illustrators Show (1936).11 The Great Lady fiasco (twenty performances) occurred two years later.

After their early Broadway failures, Lerner and Loewe produced their first successful Rodgers and Hammerstein–type musical on their third Broadway try, Brigadoon (1947), a romantic tale of a Scottish village that awakens from a deep sleep once every hundred years. By the end of the musical, the town offers a permanent home to a formerly jaded American who discovers the meaning of life and love (and some effective ersatz-Scottish music) within its timeless borders. The following year Lerner wrote the book and lyrics for the first of many musicals without Loewe, the modestly successful and rarely revived avant-garde “concept musical” Love Life (with music by Weill). Lerner and Loewe’s next collaboration, the occasionally revived Paint Your Wagon (1951) was less than a hit on its first run. Also in 1951 Lerner without Loewe wrote the Academy Award–winning screenplay for An American in Paris, which featured the music and lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin. By 1952 Lerner, reunited with Loewe, was ready to tackle Shaw.

My Fair Lady and Pygmalion

The Genesis

It may seem inevitable that someone would have set Pygmalion, especially when considering the apparent ease with which Lerner and Loewe adapted Shaw’s famous play for the musical stage. In fact, much conspired against any musical setting of a Shaw play for the last forty years of the transplanted Irishman’s long and productive life. The main obstacle until Shaw’s death in 1950 was the playwright himself, who, after enduring what he considered to be a travesty of Arms and the Man in Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier (1910), wrote to Theatre Guild producer Theresa Helburn in 1939 that “nothing will ever induce me to allow any other play of mine to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music except its own.”12 As early as 1921, seven years after the English premiere of his play, Shaw aggressively thwarted an attempt by Lehár to secure the rights to Pygmalion: “a Pygmalion operetta is quite out of the question.”13 As late as 1948 Shaw was rejecting offers to musicalize Pygmalion, and in response to a request from Gertrude Lawrence (the original heroine of Lady in the Dark) he offered his last word on the subject: “My decision as to Pygmalion is final: let me hear no more about it. This is final.”14

Much of our information on the genesis of My Fair Lady comes from Lerner’s engagingly written autobiography, The Street Where I Live (1978), more than one hundred pages of which are devoted to the compositional genesis, casting, and production history of their Shaw adaptation.15 Additionally, Loewe’s holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts in the Music Division of the Library of Congress offer a fascinating glimpse into some later details of the compositional process of the songs.

From Lerner we learn that after two or three weeks of intensive discussion and planning in 1952 the team’s first tussle with the musicalization of Shaw’s play had produced only discouragement. Part of the problem was that the reverence Lerner and Loewe held for Shaw’s play precluded a drastic overhaul. Equally problematic, their respect for the Rodgers and Hammerstein model initially prompted Lerner and Loewe to find an appropriate place for a choral ensemble as well as a secondary love story. While a chorus could be contrived with relative ease, it was more difficult to get around the second problem: Shaw’s play “had one story and one story only,” and the central plot of Pygmalion, “although Shaw called it a romance, is a non-love story.”16 In a chance meeting with Hammerstein, the great librettist-lyricist told Lerner, “It can’t be done…. Dick [Rodgers] and I worked on it for over a year and gave it up.”17

Lerner and Loewe returned to their adaptation of Shaw two years later optimistic that a Shavian musical would be possible. As Lerner explains:

By 1954 it no longer seemed essential that a musical have a subplot, nor that there be an ever-present ensemble filling the air with high C’s and flying limbs. In other words, some of the obstacles that had stood in the way of converting Pygmalion into a musical had simply been removed by a changing style…. As Fritz and I talked and talked, we gradually began to realize that the way to convert Pygmalion to a musical did not require the addition of any new characters…. We could do Pygmalion simply by doing Pygmalion following the screenplay [of the 1938 film as altered by director Gabriel Pascal] more than the [stage] play and adding the action that took place between the acts of the play.18

Instead of placing Higgins