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

8

THE LEGACY OF MY FAIR LADY

THE MUSICAL THEATER OF LERNER AND LOEWE

My Fair Lady was unquestionably the highpoint of the Lerner and Loewe relationship, both artistically and commercially. Yet even if they were not as popular, the experience of writing the earlier shows was crucial to the composer and lyricist’s development. For one thing, the storylines of their four previous Broadway musicals—What’s Up? (1943), The Day Before Spring (1945), Brigadoon (1947), and Paint Your Wagon (1951)—were broadly original, rather than adaptations of existing material. While the decision to set an established classic may partly explain the much greater success of My Fair Lady (which was their only show to date unhampered by a problematic book), writing their earlier musicals from scratch gave them the freedom to experiment with structure. For instance, they used extensive ballet sequences in both What’s Up? (directed and choreographed by the ballet legend George Balanchine) and The Day Before Spring (choreographed by the British ballet dancer Antony Tudor) to manipulate the narrative through dance. So although the ballet was ultimately cut from My Fair Lady, its initial inclusion followed a pattern established in their early works.

The Day Before Spring was an important experience in other ways, too. The script, though flawed because of some peculiar moments of fantasy and perhaps a lack of action and excitement, was witty and mature in subject matter, just as Fair Lady was later to be. The story deals with the rekindling of an old romance during a college reunion, when a woman discovers that her former love has written a novel about her in the ten-year interim, and considers eloping with him and leaving her husband—comparatively risqué for a musical of this period. Musically, Loewe learned much from writing songs in contrasting styles. In particular, the Latin flair of “God’s Green World” would later reap dividends in “The Rain in Spain” and “Show Me,” while the title number and “You Haven’t Changed at All” reveal Loewe’s use of sophisticated chromatic movement to add interest and piquancy to romantic ballads.1 Again, this is something that characterizes many of his later songs. The first-act finale has a different complexity, namely a fluid sequence of contrasting sections of music that reflects its intricate verse structure. The protagonist, Katherine, has to make up her mind—should she run off with her former love or stay with her husband?—so she asks statues of Plato, Voltaire, and Freud (who come to life) for their advice. They each answer differently, with individually-characterized music to match, and Loewe binds it all together in a large-scale structure based on tonal and thematic relationships. This model took on a more familiar form in My Fair Lady as “You Did It,” the concerted number that opens the second act. The other important aspect of The Day Before Spring is that it contains music that was later reused—including sections of both the title song from Gigi and “On the Street Where You Live.”2

A big step forward was taken with Brigadoon. There is a noticeable coherence about the piece, and the music hangs together more convincingly: Loewe learned how to create a kind of musical tinta (a unifying “color”) so that the individual numbers had elements in common that gave them coherence. The use of dotted rhythms in many of the songs evokes Scotland, in an allusion to the folk music of the country, and thereby gives them stylistic unity. There are also several important dances and a strong role for the chorus, and in “The Chase” Lerner and Loewe evolved an extensive number that propels the action forward compellingly. It is an altogether more sophisticatedly conceived work, even if its atmosphere is far from sophisticated. Similar traits are found in Paint Your Wagon (1951), with gestures signifying the Wild West giving the score its unique character, and easily a third of the music consisted of dances. Both musicals are complex in construction, and show a composer and lyricist who knew what they were doing. These were the first two of their Broadway shows to be filmed, the first two to be revived, and the first containing a handful of songs that became standards.3

The problem was that neither show really gave Loewe the opportunity to compose the more lavish, glamorous music with which he was to excel in their next three musicals (My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot). Similarly, Lerner’s keenly romantic brand of poetry, coupled with a wordy sophistication, was not as much at home in the Scottish heather of Brigadoon or the plain desert of Paint Your Wagon as it would subsequently be when he turned to established sources of European literature for his three masterpieces with Loewe. He later commented that after The Day Before Spring, “I got off the track. Both Brigadoon and Paint Your Wagon were much more along the Oklahoma[!] road than the one I had set out on, and I was determined somehow to find my way back. So I, too, was as drawn to Pygmalion as Fritz was.”4Fair Lady was a significant moment in the Lerner and Loewe collaboration, after years of never quite achieving the impact of certain of their rivals—notably Rodgers and Hammerstein.

SHADOWS OF THE PAST: RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN, SHAW, AND OPERETTA

Just as Lerner and Loewe’s experiences with their early shows informed their composition of My Fair Lady, so too did the work of their contemporaries have an impact on the show. From 1943 on, the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II was the leading force on Broadway. The success of Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), and The King and I (1951) was matched with an acute business sense on the part of both composer and lyricist that helped them to control every aspect of their productions, making them a legendary partnership, which had never before and, arguably, has never since been matched. It is in the context of