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

My Fair Lady and which are quintessentially American in style and subject matter. Even “I Could Have Danced All Night,” whose arpeggiated melody and relatively high tessitura require a performer of some vocal poise, has an unmistakable Broadway bounce and abandon.

Where the show does venture into artier waters, there is always a reason for it. Loewe deliberately makes “The Ascot Gavotte” sound archaic and affected, to reflect the artifice of the aristocracy at the races. Similarly, “The Servants’ Chorus” is mannered and stiff in style to mirror the long, monotonous hours the servants have to endure as the clock ticks by during Eliza’s lessons. “The Embassy Waltz” is a diegetic piece of music playing in the background at the ball, so its reliance on the Viennese waltz idiom is entirely appropriate, and the use of a concerted structure for “You Did It” is undoubtedly meant to be read in quotation marks, matching the satire of the lyrics; Lerner later referred to it, tongue-in-cheek, as “a sort of Hyde Park Fledermaus.”23 He also revealed that the most lyrical part of it, when Pickering originally had more lines, was cut specifically because he “was singing too long” and said that the number “is a sort of ruse to prevent the audience from realizing that a lot of bad singing is going on.”24 This is the opposite of the aim of the traditional operatic largo concertante, in which all the characters are united precisely to show off the quality and power of the cast’s singing.

In fact, the only song in the score that should be read through the lens of an operetta aria is “On the Street Where You Live.” Here, Freddy Eynsford-Hill sings of his love for Eliza in both musical and lyrical cliché, with several melodramatic vocal peaks in the melody and numerous romantic flights of fancy in the lyric, such as “All at once am I several stories high” and “Does enchantment pour out of every door?” The ways in which the number was heavily revised during the out-of-town tryouts show that Lerner and Loewe were striving for an amusing effect. We are meant to laugh at Freddy, and thereby realize why he is an impossible match for Eliza: his song is superficially pretty but a little dull and insipid, rather like himself. Therefore, the employment of an operetta style in this number is deliberate and fulfills its intended effect of making the singing Freddy an outsider, while the dismissal of the rest of the score as being stylistically anachronistic is too much of a generalization to be convincing.

The three aspects of the show’s reception discussed earlier are interwoven: My Fair Lady has often been presented as beholden, whether to Rodgers and Hammerstein, to Shaw, or to the operetta genre, the implication being that it is not completely “original” and that the adaptation is passive. Yet there were several hundred changes to Shaw’s text, along with the addition of completely new episodes. More than this, the realignment of the Eliza-Higgins relationship allowed Lerner and Loewe to create a much more tantalizingly ambiguous situation than in Pygmalion. By using all the elements of musical theater to the full, they created something that is obviously quite separate and unique from the play.

AN ACTIVE ADAPTATION

As much as anything, the problem with writers’ inclination to read Fair Lady as subservient to various precedents has been one of formulation. It is still important to understand that Shaw and Rodgers and Hammerstein belong in the reception of My Fair Lady, but not in a way that denies Lerner and Loewe the full extent of their contribution. For instance, it is undeniable that Rodgers and Hammerstein brought in a more substantial type of musical theater with their collaboration, as Lerner himself was always ready to acknowledge.25 This particularly applies to the books (librettos), which are so much more than soufflés or mere star vehicles. The King and I is an especially important precursor. Like Fair Lady, it is based on a substantial literary source and takes several ideas from the screen adaptation of that book.26 More significantly, Rodgers and Hammerstein deal not only with a serious subject involving racial tensions and the death of the male protagonist but also with a central relationship that is not unlike that of Higgins and Eliza, both socially and emotionally. Anna Leonowens comes from England to become tutor to the offspring of the King of Siam, and the show charts a clash of cultures as Anna attempts to bring Western, democratic values to the pantheistic, feudal culture she finds in the East. This theme is propelled by a series of tautly woven interactions between the principal characters. What emerges is the attraction between the polygamous king and the prudish, Christian teacher. Consummation of this attraction is rendered impossible by their situation—she does not approve of his moral code and seems to have embraced widowhood as a permanent way of life, while he would probably not accept a Western wife and would certainly not treat her as an equal, as Anna would demand—yet Rodgers and Hammerstein tantalize us with the possibility quite brilliantly. He is clearly attracted when she stands up to him, and the climax of the show is their second-act duet, “Shall We Dance?,” in which they unite in a grand polka. This drives the relationship to its most intimate, yet the number is interrupted and the next time they meet, the king is on his deathbed.

Obviously, the tragic ending of The King and I is quite different to the final scene of My Fair Lady, but there is no doubt that this kind of musical helped pave the way for Lerner and Loewe. In both shows, the musical numbers and spoken dialogue have equal weight, rather than the dialogue merely filling in the spaces between the lyric moments; they both explore wider social issues as well as painting psychologically complex relationships in the foreground; and neither of them capitulates to the cliché of the romantic ending, albeit in