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

as a professor of phonetics in a university setting in order to generate the need for a chorus of students, Professor Higgins used his home as his laboratory and a chorus composed of his servants now sufficed. Since the move from a tea party at the home of Higgins’s mother to the Ascot races provided the opportunity for a second chorus, it seemed unnecessary to insert a third chorus at the Embassy Ball. Although they did not invent any characters, Lerner and Loewe did provide a variation of a Rodgers and Hammerstein–type subplot by expanding the role of Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s father.19 Despite these changes and other omissions and insertions that alter the tone and meaning of Shaw’s play, Lerner’s libretto follows much of the Pygmalion text with remarkable tenacity. In contrast to any of the adaptations considered here, Lerner and Loewe’s libretto leaves long stretches of dialogue virtually unchanged.

By November 1954 Lerner and Loewe had completed five songs for their new musical. Two of these, “The Ascot Gavotte” and “Just You Wait,” would eventually appear in the show. Another song intended for Eliza, “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” would be partially salvaged in the Embassy Ball music and recycled in the film Gigi (1958).20 Also completed by November 1954 were two songs intended for Higgins, “Please Don’t Marry Me,” the “first attempt to dramatize Higgins’s misogyny,” and “Lady Liza,” the first of several attempts to find a song in which Higgins would encourage a demoralized Eliza to attend the Embassy Ball.21 Rex Harrison, the Higgins of choice from the outset, vigorously rejected both of these songs, and they quickly vanished. The casting of Harrison, the actor most often credited with introducing a new kind of talk-sing, was of course a crucial decision that affected the musical characteristics of future Higgins songs.22 A second try at “Please Don’t Marry Me” followed in 1955 and resulted in the now familiar “I’m an Ordinary Man.” “Come to the Ball” replaced “Lady Liza” and stayed in the show until opening night. Lerner summarizes the compositional progress of their developing show: “By mid-February [1955] we left London with the Shaw rights in one hand, commitments from Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, and Cecil Beaton [costumes] in the other, two less songs than we had arrived with [“Please Don’t Marry Me” and “Lady Liza”] and a year’s work ahead of us.”23

Earlier Lerner reported that a winter’s journey around the frigid Covent Garden had yielded the title and melody of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.” The genesis of Eliza’s first song demonstrates the team’s usual pattern: title, tune, and, after excruciating procrastination and writer’s block, a lyric.24 The lyricist details the agony of creation for “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” a process that took Loewe “one afternoon” and Lerner weeks of delay and psychological trauma before he could even produce a word. Six weeks “after a successful tour around the neighborhood with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’” they completed Higgins’s opening pair of songs, “Why Can’t the English?” and “I’m an Ordinary Man.”25 These are the last songs that Lerner mentions before rehearsals began in January 1956.

Lerner’s chronology accounts for all but four My Fair Lady songs: “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “The Servants’ Chorus,” “Promenade,” and “Without You.” All Lerner has to say about “With a Little Bit of Luck” is that it was written for Holloway sometime before rehearsals.26 But although Lerner’s autobiography provides no additional chronological information about the remaining three songs, we are not reduced to idle speculation concerning two of these. On musical evidence it is apparent that the “Introduction to Promenade” was adapted from “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” one of the earliest songs drafted for the show.27 It will also be observed shortly that the principal melody of “Without You” is partially derived from Higgins’s “I’m an Ordinary Man,” completed nearly a year before rehearsals.28 Loewe’s holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts of My Fair Lady songs verify Lerner’s remark that this last-mentioned song underwent “one or two false starts.”29 Harrison described one of these as “inferior Noël Coward.”30 (In other differences with the published vocal score, the holograph of “You Did It” contains a shortened introduction and a considerable amount of additional but mostly repetitive material.)31

Of great importance for the peformance style of Higgins’s role was the decision to allow the professor to talk his way into a song or a new phrase of a song. In “I’m an Ordinary Man,” “A Hymn to Him,” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” audiences have long been accustomed to hear Higgins speak lines that are underscored by orchestral melody; the pitches are usually indicated in the vocal part by X’s, recalling the notation of Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire. The first of many examples of this occurs at the beginning of “I’m an Ordinary Man.” This move from song to speech probably occurred during the course of rehearsals. In any event, the holograph scores almost invariably indicate that these passages were originally meant to be sung.32

A New Happy Ending

In their most significant departure from their source Lerner and Loewe altered Shaw’s ending to allow a romantic resolution between Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. Shaw strenuously argued against this Cinderella interpretation, but he would live to regret that his original concluding lines in 1912 allow the possibility that Eliza, who has metamorphosed into “a tower of strength, a consort battleship,” will return to live with Higgins and Pickering as an independent woman, one of “three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.”33 While in his original text Shaw expresses Higgins’s confidence that Eliza will return with the requested shopping list, for the next forty years the playwright would quixotically try to establish his unwavering intention that Higgins and Eliza would never marry.34 Here are the final lines of Shaw’s play:

MRS. HIGGINS: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and glove.

HIGGINS: (sunnily) Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy ’em all