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

which folded after five performances, also marked the Broadway debut of Loesser, who wrote the lyrics of several Irving Actman songs for this same show.

12. Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1926–1950 (New York: Viking, 1988), 528.

13. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1911–1925, (New York: Viking, 1985), 730–31. It is clear from this letter, however, that Shaw’s motives were as much financial as they were artistic.

14. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1926–1950, 817.

15. Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 30–135. See also Stephen Citron, Wordsmiths, 261–64, and Keith Garebian, The Making of “My Fair Lady” (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993).

16. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 36.

17. Ibid., 38. In Lees’s undocumented claim, Lerner and Loewe “knew that he [Pascal] had previously approached Rodgers and Hammerstein, Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, Cole Porter, and E. Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy, all of whom had turned the project down as fraught with insoluble book problems.” Gene Lees, Inventing Champagne, 88.

18. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 43–44.

19. In contrast to the Rodgers and Hammerstein prototype, in which the secondary characters show some emotional or comic bond and sing to or about one another, My Fair Lady audiences never actually meet Doolittle’s bride.

20. “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” would be abandoned in the Broadway version of Gigi (1973).

21. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 50. Before it became My Fair Lady, Lady Liza was the show’s working title.

22. Harrison attributed his idiosyncratic combination of speaking and singing to conductor Bill Low. According to Harrison, Low informed him that “there is such a thing as talking on pitch—using only those notes that you want to use, picking them out of the score, sometimes more, sometimes less. For the rest of the time, concentrate on staying on pitch, even though you’re only speaking.” Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 108.

23. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 65. Harrison places his meeting with Lerner, Loewe, and their lawyer, Herman Levin, several months later “in the summer of 1955 … in the middle of the London run of Bell, Book and Candle.” Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 106.

24. Lyricist-composers Porter and Loesser similarly gave their songs a title before composing a tune. Lerner also shared the frustrations suffered by fellow lyricist-librettist Hammerstein. While falling somewhat short of Rodgers’s legendary speed (e.g., “Bali Ha’i” allegedly in five minutes, “Happy Talk” in twenty), the comparative ease and rapidity with which Loewe composed melodies was a fate that Lerner too had to endure.

25. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 70.

26. Lerner places the creation of “The Rain in Spain,” his one “unexpected visitation from the muses,” during a spontaneous ten-minute period after an audition (Ibid., 87). Harrison contradicts Lerner when he recalls hearing “The Rain in Spain” along with “Lady Liza” and “Please Don’t Marry Me” at his initial London meeting with Lerner, Loewe, and Levin. Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 107.

27. Just as “Say a Prayer” would return two years later in the film Gigi, the main theme of “Promenade” would return in both the film and subsequent stage versions of this show as “She Is Not Thinking of Me.”

28. The chronology of “The Servants’ Chorus” must remain conjectural. The most likely hypothesis is that it followed the inception of “The Rain in Spain” during rehearsals. The fact that the lyrics were added in pen in the Library of Congress holograph score suggests, but does not confirm, that they were a late addition.

29. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 70.

30. Ibid., 79. The earlier version of “Why Can’t the English?,” the lyrics of which Lerner discusses in his autobiography (Ibid., 79–80), can be found on the reverse sides of three song holographs in the Loewe Collection of the Library of Congress: “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Show Me,” and “On the Street Where She Lives” (original title). Larry Stempel notes their presence and their “Coward touch,” as exemplified in “Mad Dogs and Englishman,” in the first two of these holograph scores. See Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play Expands,” 166, note 18.

31. The holograph does not display a text over the underscoring as found on the vocal score (152 and 159) or the right-hand accompaniment figure that is prominently featured a little later (160 and 161). Also in the holograph the word “aren’” (to rhyme with “foreign”) appears as “aren’t.”

32. A complete list for the spoken passages in the three mentioned Higgins songs follows: “I’m an Ordinary Man” (“I’m an ordinary man,” “But let a …” [all three times], “I’m a very gentle man,” and “I’m a quiet-living man”) [the final spoken “Let a woman in your life” does not appear on the holograph in any form]; “A Hymn to Him” (“What in all of Heaven could have prompted her to …” [the next word “go” is sung] and “Why can’t a …” [the next word “woman” is sung]; and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“I can see her now,” “In a …,” and “I’m a most forgiving man”).

Despite this increased tendency to replace song with speech-song, the holograph indicates that some passages were originally spoken. For example: “A Hymn to Him” (“Why can’t a woman be like that?,” “Why can’t a woman be like you?,” and “Why can’t a woman be like us?”); and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“Damn!! Damn!! Damn!! Damn!!” and “I’ve grown accustomed to her face!” at the beginning of the song, and later the “quasi recitative” “Poor Eliza! How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful!”). It should also be noted that the holograph of the opening three syllables in Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “The Lord a-,” indicates three sung pitches, a rising scale G-A-B leading to a C on “-bove.”

33. George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion/Alan Jay Lerner My Fair Lady (New York: Signet, 1975), 88.

34. As late as February 23, 1948, ten years after the film version of Pygmalion, Shaw would write, “I absolutely forbid the Campbell interpolation [‘What size’] or any suggestion that the middle-aged bully and