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

Evening with Alan Jay Lerner” presented at New York’s 92nd Street Y in 1971, Lerner discussed the negative response to this song, his own desire to retain it, his failure to understand why it failed, and his solution to the problem several days later.55 For Lerner, the “mute disinterest” that greeted this song was due to the fact that audiences were unable to distinguish Freddy Eynesford-Hill from the other gentlemen at Ascot.56 Lerner’s autobiography relates how he gave Freddy a new verse to help audiences remember him; in his “Evening” at the Y, Lerner explains a revision in which for the sake of clarity Freddy has the maid ask him to identify himself by name. In Lerner’s view the positive response to this change was vindication enough. Certainly “On the Street Where You Live” remains the most frequently performed song outside the context of the show.

The rich afterlife of “On the Street Where You Live” as an independent song may provide a clue as to why everyone else concerned with the show (other than Lerner) was willing, even eager, to cut this future hit after it failed to register on its opening night audience. Lehman Engel, an astute and sensitive Broadway critic and a staunch proponent of the integrated musical, writes that when he sees a musical for the first time “the highest compliment anyone can pay is to not be conscious of the songs.”57 The absence of such awareness “indicates that all of the elements worked together so integrally that I was aware only of the total effect.”

Engel’s reaction to My Fair Lady expresses the problem clearly:

I had a similar response to My Fair Lady the first time [that like Fiddler on the Roof, the elements worked integrally], but I did hear “On the Street Where You Live” and I believe this happened for two reasons. In the first place, nothing else was going on when the song was sung; the singing character was simply (and intentionally) stupid—nothing complex about that.58 But secondly I heard the song because I disliked it intensely. (I love everything else in the score. But this song, to me, did not fit.) It was the picture that shoved its way out of the frame with a bang. Suddenly there was a “pop” song that had strayed into a score otherwise brilliant, integrated, with a great sense of the play’s own style and a faithful, uncompromising exposition of characters and situations.

Although much of My Fair Lady departs from Shaw’s play, its Cinderella slant nevertheless constitutes an extraordinarily faithful adaptation to Pascal’s filmed revision of Shaw’s original screenplay. Moreover, the music of My Fair Lady for the most part accurately serves most of Shaw’s textual ideas. Additionally, the songs themselves, which are carefully prepared and advance the action in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, convey the dramatic meaning that underlies this action.

One critical quandary remains. Just as Higgins neglects to consider the question of what is to become of Eliza, Lerner and Loewe’s popular adaptation of My Fair Lady poses the problem of what is to become of Shaw’s Pygmalion, a play that noted literary critics, including Harold Bloom, consider to be the playwright’s masterpiece.59 The relative decline of Shaw’s Pygmalion in the wake of My Fair Lady seems especially lamentable.60

But even measured by Shavian standards, Lerner and Loewe’s classic musical is by no means overshadowed on artistic grounds. Readers of Shaw’s play know, as Shaw knew, that Higgins would “never fall in love with anyone under forty-five.”61 Indeed, marrying Freddy might have its drawbacks, but marrying Higgins would be unthinkable. It is the ultimate achievement of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady that the unthinkable has become the probable.

Two years after My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe completed Gigi, the Academy Award–winning film adaptation of a Colette novella. Not wishing to argue with success, Gigi, like My Fair Lady, tells the story of a young woman who ends up with an older man—Cinderella revisited. The final Broadway collaboration appeared two years later, Camelot (1960), a partially successful attempt to recycle a production team (director Hart and Julie Andrews as Guenevere, as well as a new, acclaimed, non-singing actor in the Harrison tradition, Richard Burton, as King Arthur). The box office magic of the My Fair Lady “team” and a long televised segment on the Ed Sullivan Show helped Camelot—the positive associations with President Kennedy came later—to survive its extraordinarily bad critical press, growing tensions between Lerner and Loewe, and Lerner’s hospitalization for bleeding ulcers. Perhaps the most devastating blow of all was Hart’s sudden heart attack and hospitalization, which forced the director to assume the unaccustomed role of patient rather than that of play doctor, a role he had performed so irreplaceably on My Fair Lady.

Even those who feel that Eliza should have gone off into the sunset (or the fog) with Freddy rather than the misogynist Higgins might have second thoughts about Guenevere’s decision to abandon her likable and desirable husband Arthur for the younger but boorish and egotistical Lancelot. As Engel writes: “It is not lack of fidelity that makes for our dissatisfaction but an unmotivated, rather arbitrary choice that seemed to make no sense.”62

After Camelot, Lerner and Loewe would adapt Gigi for Broadway in 1973 (it ran for only three months). One year later they would work together on new material for the last time in the film The Little Prince. With the exceptions of these brief returns, Loewe, who had collaborated exclusively with Lerner ever since What’s Up? in 1943, retired on his laurels and died quietly in 1988. The more restless Lerner, who as early as the 1940s had teamed up with Weill on Love Life one year after Brigadoon, would collaborate with Burton Lane within five years after Camelot to create the modestly successful On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

For his last twenty years, Lerner without Loewe—and, in some respects equally unfortunately, without Moss Hart, who died in 1961—would produce one failure after another. Not even the