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

It is not merely an embellishment or divertissement but represents passage of time and depicts action. A breathtaking process of chiaroscuro (a contrast between light and dark) takes place during the course of the number. Most of the song is humorous: the beer-loving dustman ruefully drinks his way around London in the final hours before his wedding. Although the material is simple, Loewe puts in witty little touches such as the appoggiaturas on “married in the” to suggest Doolittle’s “comfortable” nature. But suddenly, after the main part of the song and Rittmann’s imaginative jig, “Dawn breaks over the Flower Market” and the revelry must end. To the music of the main refrain, Doolittle’s friends suddenly adopt a hushed tone and provide their own harmonies (with only occasional horn and harp notes to maintain the pitch) in an unexpected farewell stanza, ending with “Good luck, old chum. / Good health, goodbye.” The final four lines of the refrain are alternately marked mezzo forte and pianissimo, so that the actual “goodbye” is almost whispered. Doolittle’s journey from obscurity to fortune is now over, and he departs from the show. Like Eliza, he has been both bruised and helped by Higgins’s intervention, but in his case it is money, not education, that has caused this outcome. Through “Get Me to the Church” in particular, Lerner and Loewe make Doolittle into a figure of pathos, and they do so through both words and music.

FREDDY’S CONSTANCY

The supposed inspiration for the creation of “On the Street Where You Live” is the subject of a romanticized anecdote in Lerner’s memoir. He says that “When I was ten years old I had been sent to a dancing class on Sunday afternoons, white gloves and all. The prettiest girl was, of course, the most popular, but I was too shy to make my presence felt.”13 He goes on to describe how he sat outside what he believed to be her house every Saturday, only later to discover that she lived somewhere else. But in truth, other than its reference to a boy waiting outside the house of the girl he loves, Lerner’s story bears little resemblance to the scene from Fair Lady—especially in the sense that Freddy Eynsford-Hill is not exactly shy in his advances. Outline 1 shows that the number was to have been sung in a scene where the spectators are shown leaving Ascot, and its purpose was always clear: “Freddy is absolutely smitten with Liza. (He may have a song about it.)”14 This could be taken to disprove Lerner’s story, because the song had been imagined in a setting that bore no resemblance to the tale; or it could be taken to corroborate it, because its title and final conception are very much bound to the idea of a boy waiting for his beloved on a street. Outline 4 mentions the song with the name by which it was known throughout rehearsals: “On the Street Where She Lives.”15

Later in his book, Lerner elaborates on the development of the song during the New Haven previews, describing how the whole creative team, apart from Lerner himself, wanted to cut it. It even had a lukewarm reception from preview audiences. But Lerner became conscious that “perhaps the audience did not realize [Freddy] was the same boy who had been sitting next to Eliza and talking to her during the [Ascot] scene. … So as a last-ditch effort to save the song, we changed the verse…and replaced the flowery, romantic one he was then singing with one that echoed Eliza at Ascot, beginning with: “When she mentioned how her aunt bit off the spoon / She completely done me in, etc.” Fritz changed the music accordingly and the new verse went in on Thursday night.” The number “almost required an encore,” Lerner concludes.16

He told the same story during a concert presentation in 1971, and what he referred to as the “original version” of the verse of “On the Street” was performed.17 However, the performance was based on the published song sheet (from 1956), which contains just a section of the original verse, and in fact the number was originally more extensive than even this score suggests. The original lyric is shown in appendix 3 (with the cut passages in bold text). The second and third stanzas in this original version are what was printed in the published song sheet; the only difference is that the published version changes the tense from the third person to the second (so it becomes “Darling, there’s the tree you run to,” and so on). A copyist’s piano-vocal score shows the number in its original form, complete with full verse (an extract is reproduced in exx. 6.1 and 6.2) and the whole refrain.

It is difficult not to conclude—more straightforwardly than Lerner—that these sections were discarded simply because they were insipid. The lyricist would have us believe that the verse was changed because people might not connect the character singing the number with the character having the dialogue with Eliza at the races, but the original lyric already referred to the Ascot scene (“Love attacked me while I was at the races”). The new verse (“When she mentioned how her aunt bit off the spoon…”) also brought about an endearing comic moment in which Freddy strings together phrases from Eliza’s conversation at Ascot, leaving the audience to fill in the final word—“[move your bloomin’] arse” as a rhyme for “[a more enchanting] farce”—when Mrs. Pearce conveniently opens the front door of Higgins’s house to interrupt him. The humor is pointed in the musical word-setting with pauses after “aunt” and “father,” gentle prods in the audience’s ribs to milk the laughs.

Ex. 6.1. “On the Street Where She Lives,” original verse.

Ex. 6.2. “On the Street Where She Lives,” original verse.

Lerner also makes no reference to the fact that sixteen bars were cut from the middle of the song (part of which is shown in ex. 6.3), reducing the refrain to its