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

that are not included in the published vocal score.45 None of these contains the section Lerner refers to as having been added late in the day (though he misleads us slightly by suggesting that only two lines were added; it was in fact a stanza of four lines, beginning “‘Her blood,’ he said, ‘is bluer than the Danube is or ever was!’”).46 The first excision involved condensing the first return of the opening theme. Pickering sings three sections, starting “Tonight, old man, you did it” (A), “I must have aged a year tonight” (B) and “I said to him, ‘You did it!’” (A), respectively. Originally, the return of A was as long as its original statement:

Pickering

I said to him, ‘You did it!

You did it! You did it!

I didn’t think it possible

But there she is!

I told you to forget it;

I warned you’d regret it.

And now a prince is telling her

How fair she is.

I was as excited

And agog as I could be.

Higgins

It was nonsense. Silly nonsense.47

Pickering

I was more uneasy,

More afraid than even she.

Higgins

Of course. Of course.

Dear chap, of course you were.

It didn’t mean half as much to her.

Pickering

You absolutely did it!

You did it! You did it!

They thought she was ecstatic

And so damned aristocratic,

And they never knew that

You did it!

Eventually, the first two lines of Pickering’s first stanza and the last four of his final stanza were welded together and the rest discarded. The change shortened the number and thereby increased its musical pressure, and also removed the comments made by Higgins and Pickering that vigorously insult Eliza. Pickering asserts that he was more afraid about the ball than Eliza was, while Higgins agrees that the episode did not mean “half as much to her” as it did to the Colonel. This represents something of a turn of character for Pickering: though the entire song finds him less sympathetic than normal toward Eliza, the point is that the men ignore her after her triumph, rather than being actively insulting.48 Likewise, for Higgins to say “It didn’t mean half as much to her” demonizes him in a way that the rest of the song does not.

The other change was probably for musical rather than dramatic considerations. Originally, the final section of the song—when Pickering and the servants sing a contrapuntal passage following “Congratulations, Professor Higgins!”—was more extensive (see appendix 5). The published version contains only the first and last stanzas of this initial lyric (with a couple of minor changes), and the majority of the material at this point was cut. Interestingly, this music contains a different gesture to anything else in the show (partly quoted in ex. 6.7). Although the “Congratulations!” passage is contrapuntal even in its published form, the antiphonal effects between Pickering and the servants in the original version made the number stiffer, more like an operetta ensemble, and thereby more old-fashioned. In spite of William Zinsser’s insistence that Lerner and Loewe “were a throwback to the earlier generic team of Gilbert and Sullivan” and that Loewe’s music “continued to sound Viennese,” the composer in fact removed the passage of music that most connected the show to these styles of composition.49

Ex. 6.7. “You Did It,” cut passage.

This cut also represents an act of compression: it drives the piece home more quickly, more smoothly, and more breathtakingly. One notable aspect of the passage was the return of a second earlier theme (“I must confess without undue conceit,” deriving from “Now wait, now wait, give credit where it’s due”) in addition to the “You did it!” theme. The latter remained in the published version but only as a contrapuntal underpinning of the new “Congratulations!” theme; the barer “I must confess” part and the antiphonal section as a whole draw attention to themselves more assertively. By removing them, Loewe gave the closing section the air and function of an operatic stretta but foreshortened it to avoid direct allusion.

Loewe’s triumph in My Fair Lady was to create a score that truly enhances the potential of Pygmalion yet without overwhelming or undermining that text with extraneous musical numbers. Surely “Why Can’t the English?” depicts Higgins’s character better than any dialogue could, while the lessons sequence is a series of musical scenes with little precedence in the musical theater repertoire. This also represents a clear enhancement of Shaw’s text. Furthermore, theatrical technique is apparent throughout the score; for instance, “The Embassy Waltz” is a compelling use of musical diegesis, where the music is both part of the onstage action and expressive of the emotion of the scene. As for musical technique, the range of compositional approaches is brilliant, whether in the use of dance forms in the creation of songs like “Show Me” and “Just You Wait” or large-scale forms as in “You Did It,” as is the no less impressive way in which Loewe binds it all together. In this, he shares the credit with his colleagues: Rittmann’s arrangements and the orchestrations of Bennett, Lang, and Mason helped make the score contrapuntally taut and gave it its magical palette of sonorities.

But in the end, Lerner and Loewe’s most impressive achievement was the way in which they eventually balanced the Higgins-Eliza relationship in their songs. We have seen numerous examples of songs discarded as inappropriate (“There’s a Thing Called Love”), replaced by better numbers (“Please Don’t Marry Me” into “An Ordinary Man”), replaced by songs with a completely different subtext (“Shy” into “I Could Have Danced All Night”), or refined to remove gestures of conventional romance (“You Did It”). Although it is relatively commonplace for large numbers of songs from Broadway shows to be discarded before completion or cut before opening night, it is rare to find quite such a clear motivation for their removal as in My Fair Lady.

7

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

MY FAIR LADY ON STAGE

The performance history of My Fair Lady has been characterized by long runs and critical success. The original Broadway production ran for more than six years and 2,717 performances, and in so doing overtook Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!