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

35. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1911–1925, 227.

36. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Volume II, 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power (New York: Random House, 1989), 339.

37. Ibid., 340.

38. Donald P. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye: Shaw and the Cinema. Costello discusses each of the fourteen scenes that appear in the film but not its screenplay; he also offers a useful appendix, “From Play to Screen Play to Sound Track: A Textual Comparison of Three Versions of Act V of Shaw’s Pygmalion.”

39. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 187–88.

40. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1926–1950, 532–33.

41. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 93–94. The remaining quotations in this paragraph can be found on p. 94.

42. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 76.

43. Considering its indebtedness to the Pascal film, it is not surprising that on the title page of the My Fair Lady vocal score, Lerner and Loewe were requested to include the phrase “adapted from Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ produced on the screen by Gabriel Pascal,” and that Pascal would receive 1 percent of the My Fair Lady royalties. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 68.

44. The exercises themselves appeared in the film (but not the published screenplay): “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” for vowels and “in Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen” for aspirate h’s. See the stage photograph of this latter exercise on p. 271 and its counterpart in the film on p. 323.

45. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 140.

46. The opening notes of Loewe’s melody are identical to the opening of Brahms’s intermezzo for piano in C minor, op. 117, no. 3. On the subject of musical quotation, Tosca’s “Non la sospiri la nostra casetta” in act I of her opera bears an uncanny melodic resemblance to Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck.” In contrast to Blitzstein’s and Bernstein’s significant classical borrowings, neither of these possible My Fair Lady borrowings was apparently chosen to make a dramatic point.

47. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 196.

48. Ibid., 199.

49. More remote and perhaps unintentional are the melodic correspondences between the opening A sections of “On the Street Where You Live” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” In any event, it makes sense that a dramatically transformed Higgins would sing a variation of Freddy’s lovesick tune. After all, Higgins could easily have heard Freddy’s song on any number of the many occasions Eliza’s would-be suitor performed it under his window. Although the causes are less dramatically explicable, it is also arguable that “On the Street Where You Live” is melodically derived from “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

50. It might be recalled that the rhythm of “Get Me to the Church on Time” was anticipated in the middle portion of “Just You Wait,” where it was preceded by an upbeat.

51. The full text of “Come to the Ball” is located in Benny Green, ed., A Hymn to Him: The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner, 109–10. Loewe’s holograph score can be found in folder 15 of the Loewe Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

52. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 88–89.

53. Ibid., 106.

54. Ibid., 106–7. Lerner went on to explain how “quite unwittingly, the new scene also solved our one major costume problem.” In contrast to the original ball scene when Eliza’s elegant gown was unable to stand out from the splendor of the other gowns, “in the new scene she appeared at the top of the stairs in Higgins’ house in her ball gown, and the audience broke into applause.” Ibid., 108.

55. The original text of “On the Street Where You Live” appears in Green, ed., A Hymn to Him, 96. Lerner commented on and performed the opening night version of this song in “An Evening with Alan Jay Lerner” at the 92nd Street Y, December 12, 1971 (Book-of-the-Month Records 70–524; re-released on DRG 5175 [1977])

56. Shaw introduces Freddy and his ineffectual attempts to hail a cab as well as his sister Clara in act I; Lerner and Loewe do not present Freddy until Ascot, and they drop the role of Clara altogether.

57. Lehman Engel, Words with Music, 116. All quotations in this and the following paragraph can be found on p. 116.

58. In contrast to Engel, Lerner described “the flagrantly romantic lyric that kept edging on the absurd” as “exactly right for the character.” Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 106.

59. Harold Bloom, ed., George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), vii and 1–10.

60. The demise of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, and Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, and their displacement by Porgy and Bess, The Most Happy Fella, and Carousel has been accepted with equanimity by theater audiences and producers. Fortunately, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet have so far been spared a similar fate.

61. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 43. The original Mrs. Patrick Campbell was a youthful forty-eight at the time she introduced the role of Eliza.

62. Engel, Words with Music, 87.

63. For all of Lerner’s shows after Camelot see Benny Green, ed., A Hymn to Him for Lerner’s lyrics, and, in the case of My Man Godfrey, his outline and scenario.

Chapter 13: West Side Story

1. In his autobiography Harold Prince acknowledged that he closed the show six months prematurely. Harold Prince, Contradictions, 39–40.

2. West Side Story was surpassed in first-run longevity by twenty-two shows that premiered before 1960 (see “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959 and 1920–2008 in the online website), including several concurrent hits that had not yet completed their initial runs: Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, and, of course, My Fair Lady, which opened the year before. Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, which first paraded on Broadway two months after West Side Story and eventually ran for 1,375 performances, also eclipsed the Romeo and Juliet adaptation when it won the Tony for best musical of 1957. The London version of West Side Story was voted the Best Musical of the Year 1960. If one