Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) McHugh, Dominic (snow like ashes series txt) đ
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GEOFFREY BLOCK
Series Editor, Broadway Legacies
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If thereâs one musical that deserves to be assessed in a series titled Broadway Legacies, itâs surely My Fair Lady. From the moment of its premiere, critics and audiences alike took the show to their hearts and embraced its wit, its sense of drama, its poignancy, its vivid characters, and its tremendous score. It belongs to a select group of musicals that can truly be said to be artistic landmarks in the genreâa category that also includes shows like Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein IIâs Show Boat, Richard Rodgers and Hammersteinâs Oklahoma!, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheimâs West Side Story, and Sondheimâs Companyâas well as enjoying outstanding commercial success (its original Broadway run lasted 2,717 performances).
Yet to date, My Fair Lady has been the subject of comparatively little scholarly literature, and its composer and lyricist have been similarly marginalized. The only book dealing with their entire output is Gene Leesâs Inventing Champagne: The Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, which broke new ground in establishing a text on one of Broadwayâs most important partnerships. However, its reliance on gossip and hearsay, its absence of any musical illustration or analysis, and the decision not to cite sources for the information contained in the book, render it sometimes unreliable. Keith Garebianâs The Making of My Fair Lady similarly makes some useful observations and is a fine introduction to the show for general readers, but it is inadequately annotated for scholarly purposes. Gerald Harold Weissmanâs 1957 dissertation âThe Musicalization of Pygmalion into My Fair Ladyâ (masterâs thesis, Stanford University, 1957) benefited from input from Lerner, who allowed the author to see an early outline of the show, but the critical discussion is largely limited to how Shawâs play was adapted into a musical. The only substantive studies of the show are a single chapter each in Joseph Swainâs The Broadway Musical (New York, 1990) and Geoffrey Blockâs Enchanted Evenings (Oxford, 1997; rev. ed. 2008), both of which offer original views on the show. In particular, Blockâs account is the first to make full use of Loeweâs autograph manuscripts (housed at the Library of Congress), while Swain provides a personal analysis of the score and libretto. But because both of these are single chapters in larger books on the genre as a whole, there is an understandable limit to the amount of space that Block and Swain can devote to the show.
When I began my research in this field, it was not difficult for me to decide to focus on this undoubted masterpiece (not least because it has always been my favorite musical). The real question was how to go about it. We are fortunate in recent years to have seen a steady increase in the amount of quality scholarship on the Broadway musical available in print. Alongside Blockâs seminal Enchanted Evenings, the books that have most guided me on my way include Stephen Banfieldâs Sondheimâs Broadway Musicals, a magisterial study of the work of perhaps the most influential composer and lyricist of the past forty years; James Leveâs volume on Kander and Ebb in the excellent Yale Broadway Masters series; and three books that focus on a single musical eachâTim Carterâs Oklahoma!: The Making of an American Musical, Jim Lovensheimerâs South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten, and bruce d. mcclungâs Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical. Although the individuality of each of these authors takes their work in different directions, what they share is a seriousness of purpose that shows itself through the depth of research informing their every word. Naturally, the specific focus of Carter, Lovensheimer, and mcclungâs wonderful volumes on one show made them especially valuable models for me to use.
One of the trickiest aspects of dealing with a much-loved show like My Fair Lady is that almost everyone seems to have a story to tell about it. In contrast to the surprising dearth of scholarly literature on such a widely admired show, there is a huge amount of gossip attached to it. I quickly realized that not all of it can be proven to be true, however, so in chapters 1 and 2 I try to describe the background to the musicalâs genesis from scratch. The foundation of my revised account lies in several hundred unpublished
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