Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh, Dominic (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📗

the Theatre Guild.34 However, having made such an apparently final decision, they suddenly withdrew. Lerner’s explanation of this decision in The Street Where I Live is that he met Oscar Hammerstein II at a political rally, discovered that Hammerstein’s difficulties with the script when he had tried to write the show with Rodgers coincided with his own, and decided to withdraw on this basis.35 In the absence of any further evidence, we might more tentatively say that a problem with the book was probably the reason for the decision to abandon the show. This is confirmed by a letter sent by the Guild to Lerner on October 20, 1954, in which Helburn and Langner state that “You withdrew from the project because you said you were unable to lick the book.”36 But it is also worth bearing in mind that the severing of the contract also coincided with the dissolution of the Lerner and Loewe partnership for the time being, as each went to work with another collaborator on another project, so it seems likely, as Steven Bach has suggested, that they quarreled with each other and the script was not the only issue.37

Following this, the Theatre Guild and Pascal started pursuing other composers and lyricists, the names on their list including Arthur Schwartz (The Band Wagon), Harold Rome (Wish You Were Here), Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (The Pajama Game), André Previn (one of MGM’s staple conductors and composers), and Harold Arlen (House of Flowers).38 According to D’Andre, “Pascal offered to contact Burton Lane and Yip Harburg [of Finian’s Rainbow fame], but Helburn and Langner thought it would be better to try Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. Pascal was very enthusiastic about this idea and met with Bernstein two times. Bernstein gave a verbal agreement that he would start work on Pygmalion in the fall.”39 On February 8, 1953, the Times confirmed that “the Theatre Guild has not forgotten about its proposed project to present a musical version of Shaw’s Pygmalion. True, the team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe no longer is trying to do the book, score and lyrics. However, overtures now are being played elsewhere.”40

But at this point Theresa Helburn started to wonder whether the idea of turning Pygmalion into a musical was quite as felicitous as it had at first seemed. A musical version of J. M. Barrie’s play What Every Woman Knows had opened at New York’s National Theatre under the title Maggie and had been condemned by Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times.41 On February 20, 1953, Helburn wrote to Langner that the review “makes me feel more than ever the difficulty of making an almost classic play as a musical. Isn’t Pygmalion really fundamentally more difficult than Barrie’s play? I think we should consider this carefully before concluding the contract, unless the writers have terrific ideas.”42 It is difficult to know whether Bernstein, Comden, and Green—the dream team of On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (which opened in February 1953 less than a week after Helburn’s letter)—actually got around to writing anything for Pygmalion, but according to D’Andre, the Theatre Guild relinquished the rights to the play in May, seemingly bringing an end to the projected musical.43

CHANGING PARTNERS: LERNER AND LOEWE GO THEIR SEPARATE WAYS

October 1952–September 1954

In the meantime, Lerner and Loewe had both moved on. For the first time since joining forces with Lerner in the early 1940s, Loewe started to write with a different lyricist. In 1953 he set to work with Harold Rome on a musical to be called A Dancin’ Day, based on Sir Alexander Korda’s 1949 film, itself adapted from the play Saints and Sinners by Paul Vincent Carroll. On May 27, the New York Times ran a story by their correspondent Sam Zolotow saying that Loewe was to write the music for a new show based on Saints and Sinners, with Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields to write the book (fresh from their success in writing the book for Bernstein’s Wonderful Town) and Leo Robin (lyricist of Jule Styne’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) to write the lyrics.44 Loewe, Chodorov, and Fields went on to be involved with the project, but Robin was soon replaced by Harold Rome, composer and lyricist of the shows Call Me Mister and Wish You Were Here. Rome’s papers at Yale University reveal some details of the progress of Saints and Sinners. On July 8 an agreement was entered into with Alexander Korda and Paul Carroll for the rights to the show.45 Then on August 28 Zolotow reported in his column that Moss Hart was to read the script and that if he agreed to direct the show (as he would later take charge of My Fair Lady) his brother Bernard Hart and Joseph H. Hyman would produce it together, just as they had done with several plays directed by Hart during the 1940s including Dear Ruth, Christopher Blake, and The Secret Room.46

By September 18 circumstances had changed. Zolotow again wrote about the show, this time saying that Moss Hart had read the book and was interested, but because Chodorov and Fields were busy with their new show, The Girl in Pink Tights, the Saints and Sinners project had been deferred until the next season.47 In fact, a letter from October shows that Loewe’s lawyer was encountering trouble with the rights to Saints and Sinners. The composer had been negotiating with Paul Carroll on the understanding that he was the sole rights holder for the material. But it seems that British Lion Productions, the studio that made the 1949 film, was objecting to the deal, so the first of many delays was incurred.48 On December 9 Zolotow once again turned his attention to Saints and Sinners, reporting that Jack Hylton, the British producer of the London productions of classic musicals such as Call Me Madam and Kiss Me, Kate, would be in charge of the show.49

By January 26, 1954, a financial deal had been reached between all