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

in each act), and a new and more colorful setting at Ascot would replace Mrs. Higgins’s home (act III of Shaw). Again following the film, My Fair Lady deleted many of Doolittle’s lines, especially his philosophical musing on middle-class morality.43

If Lerner and Loewe did not invent a romantic pairing between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, they succeeded in contradicting Shaw still more completely (albeit more believably), a task made difficult by Higgins’s extraordinary misogyny, rudeness, and insensitivity in Shaw’s original play. Using the Pascal film as its guide, the Broadway Pygmalion therefore made Higgins less misogynist and generally more likable and Eliza less crude, more attractive, and more lovable than their counterparts in Shaw’s play and screenplay and Pascal’s film. Perhaps more significantly, Lerner and Loewe prepared the eventual match of Higgins and Eliza when they created two moments in song that depict their shared triumph, “The Rain in Spain” and Eliza’s gloriously happy “I Could Have Danced All Night” that shortly follows.

Lerner and Loewe would also go beyond the film with several liberties of omission and commission to help musical audiences accept the unlikely but much-wished-for romantic liaison between the antagonistic protagonists. More important, not only did Lerner remove all references to Higgins’s “mother fixation,” but he gave Higgins compassion to match his brilliance. In order to achieve Higgins’s metamorphosis from a frog to a prince, Lerner added a speech of encouragement—a song would be overkill—not found in either the film or published screenplay. Significantly, it is this newly created speech that leads directly to Eliza’s mastery of the English language as she finally utters the magic words, “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” with impeccable and lady-like diction.44

In this central speech, Higgins, in contrast to the play and screen versions, demonstrates an awareness of what his subject might be feeling and suffering: “Eliza, I know you’re tired. I know your head aches. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window.” After extolling the virtues of “the majesty and grandeur of the English language,” Higgins for the first time offers encouragement to his human experiment: “That’s what you’ve set yourself to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will…. Now, try it again.”45

A Cinderella Musical with an Extraordinary Woman

After conveying Higgins’s humanity by the end of act I, Lerner and Loewe tried in their second act to make musically explicit what Shaw implies or omits in his drama. Not only does Eliza now possess the strength and independence of “a consort battleship” admired by Higgins in Shaw’s play. After the Embassy Ball in My Fair Lady the heroine now in fact has the psychological upper hand as well. Clearly, Lerner and Loewe romanticized, and therefore falsified, Shaw’s intentions. At the same time they managed to reveal Eliza’s metamorphosis as Higgins’s equal through lyrics and music more clearly than either Shaw’s play or screenplay and Pascal’s film. The playwright lets Higgins express his delight in Eliza’s newfound independence, but he does not show how Eliza surpasses her creator (in this case Higgins) in psychological power other than by allowing Higgins to lose his composure (“he lays hands on her”). Lerner and Loewe accomplish this volte-face by taking advantage of music’s power to reveal psychological change. Simply put, the Broadway team reverse the musical roles of their protagonists.

In act I of My Fair Lady, Eliza, in response to her initial humiliation prompted by her inability to negotiate the proper pronunciation of the letter “a” and to Higgins’s heartless denial of food (recalling Petruchio’s method of “taming” Kate in Kiss Me, Kate), sputters her ineffectual dreams of vengeance in “Just You Wait” (Example 12.1a).46 Eliza sings a brief reprise of this song in act II after Higgins and the uncharacteristically inconsiderate Pickering display a callous disregard for Eliza’s part in her Embassy Ball triumph (“You Did It”). Eliza will also incorporate the tune at various moments in “Without You,” for example, when she sings “And there still will be rain on that plain down in Spain” (Example 12.1b).

My Fair Lady, act I, scene 5. Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison (“In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.”) (1956). Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection. Gift of Harold Friedlander. For a film still of this scene see p. 321.

Example 12.1. “Just You Wait” and selected transformations

(a) “Just You Wait”

(b) “Without You”

(c) “I’m an Ordinary Man”

(d) “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”

The opening phrase of the chorus in “Without You,” Eliza’s ode to independence, consists of a transformation into the major mode of “Just You Wait.” Its first four notes also inconspicuously recall Higgins’s second song of act I, “I’m an Ordinary Man,” when he first leaves speech for song on the words “who desires” (Example 12.1c). By this subtle transformation, audiences can subliminally hear as well as directly see that the tables have begun to turn as Eliza adopts Higgins’s musical characteristics. At the same time Higgins transforms Eliza into a lady, by the end of the evening Eliza (and her music) will have successfully transformed Higgins into a gentleman.

To reinforce this dramatic reversal, Higgins himself recapitulates Eliza’s “Just You Wait” material in both the minor and major modes of his final song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (Example 12.1d). At this point in the song Higgins is envisaging the “infantile idea” of Eliza’s marrying Freddy.47 The verbal and dramatic parallels between Higgins’s and Eliza’s revenge on their respective tormentors again suggest the reversal of their roles through song.

Higgins’s “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” in act II also offers a musical demonstration of a dramatic transformation needed to convince audiences that Eliza’s return is as plausible as it is desirable. In the fast sections of “I’m an Ordinary Man” in act I, Higgins explains the discomforting effect of women on his orderly existence (Example 12.2a). Higgins’s dramatic transformation in his final song is most clearly marked by tempo and dynamics, but the melodic