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

design (Beaton), and major awards for Best Actor (Harrison), Director (George Cukor), and Best Picture. The film also received Golden Globe awards in these last three categories. In the American Film Institute rankings of the Top Twenty-Five Movie Musicals of All Time created in 2006, My Fair Lady placed eighth, the fourth highest ranking among adaptations of Broadway musicals (the others in the top eight are original musical films).

We have noted that between the mid-1950s and early 1970s, roughly between The King and I and Carousel films of 1956 and Fiddler on the Roof in 1972, film musical adaptations of Broadway shows tended to be far more faithful and more complete than the films we have looked at between Show Boat and Guys and Dolls (with Pal Joey from 1957 and Porgy and Bess from 1959, not coincidentally shows created between 1935 and 1940, proving the exceptions). While some cuts, additions, and other changes can be expected, the film adaptations of Broadway musicals that debuted in the 1940s and 1950s more often than not attempted to recapture the spirit and more than occasionally the letter of their stage sources. Before the 1950s producers and studios ruled the roost. After that the creators took over. As producers, Rodgers and Hammerstein had acquired the control of their own films; Lerner and Loewe did the same for Gigi. After decades of Broadway films redesigned to serve the needs and values of Hollywood, Gigi (1958), an original musical film made by Broadway creators, served a new master. In Mast’s astute epiphany, Gigi, which won an Academy Award for best picture, “is the best Broadway musical ever written for the screen.”17

Countering the predilection toward greater fidelity to Broadway sources, Hollywood values, in particular the desire to sign movie stars with strong box office appeal, gradually led to casting decisions based more on popular appeal than on singing experience and talent. But even those first cast on Broadway as the King in The King and I (Yul Brynner) and Higgins in My Fair Lady (Harrison) were in roles conceived for dramatic actors without vocal credentials. Interestingly, there was an attempt to bypass Harrison in favor of a bigger film star—Cary Grant turned down the role and Peter O’Toole demanded unreasonably high contractual terms—but after Harrison was chosen there was no need to replace his voice with that of a more polished singer. Goldwyn, too, in casting Guys and Dolls, also wanted to attract big box office draws such as Gene Kelly and (no relation) Grace Kelly for Sky and Sarah, and his final choices, Brando and Simmons, fit this profile. Once cast, however, Brando and Simmons were expected to lend their own voices to the film and both proved adequate (or better) as singers.

Soon this would change. The film adaptation of The Music Man took a chance that paid off in casting the original stage lead, Robert Preston, who had little proven box office traction, but Jack Warner and Cukor were not eager to take a similar chance and allow Julie Andrews to repeat her stage role as Eliza Doolittle. In replacing Andrews, the goal was to find a star more likely to help Warner recoup the $5.5 million dollars he paid for the screen rights. The gorgeous and glamorous Audrey Hepburn, a box office tested movie star, fit this description, while Andrews, the luminous star of My Fair Lady on the stage but as yet an untested movie personality, did not.18 Working under the assumption that she would be the voice of Eliza in the film, Hepburn made demos of at least two songs, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “Show Me,” both of which can be seen and heard as a special feature in the two-disc DVD Special Edition. There is little question that Hepburn did not possess the voice quality either of Andrews, whom she replaced, or of Hepburn’s vocal double Marni Nixon, who had dubbed the role of Anna Leonowens for Deborah Kerr in The King and I.

On the other hand, the demos reveal a voice roughly comparable in quality to that of Jean Simmons. By this standard, Hepburn arguably made a plausible candidate to sing her role, especially when playing a character who was more guttersnipe than lady. In his autobiography, Lerner praises Leslie Caron (Gigi) for her dancing and acting but thought her singing abilities were “not up to scratch, or, if you will, too much up to scratch.”19 Later in the same paragraph he places Hepburn in the same category as an actress with “the gift for auditory illusion” who when hearing her “sadly inadequate singing voice” in a control room imagines that she is hearing Joan Sutherland.20 The fact that Harrison only sings a fraction of the actual notes in “You Did It” and about the same amount of “Hymn to Him” shows that double standards were alive and well when it came to casting Higgins and Eliza. Considering the widespread criticism Hepburn received for lacking the coarseness necessary to capture the guttersnipe Eliza before she became a lady, it seems a shame that Hepburn was not allowed to sing the songs her character sings prior to her transformation in order to create a vocal transformation to match the social one. To its credit, however, in its released version, just as we see the beauty of Hepburn underneath the dirt, thanks to the subterfuge of Marni Nixon we hear her beauty long before she emerges triumphant at the Embassy Ball.

Despite its fidelity, the film did make a few changes worth noting. “With a Little Bit of Luck” is delayed from act I, scene 2, to scene 4, where it had been reprised onstage. Now the song is both introduced and reprised in the same scene. Also in act I, scenes 6 and 7 are reversed and some dialogue of the former moved to the latter after the “Ascot Gavotte.” The film contains other reordering and some new dialogue here and there that does not effect the placement of songs.