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

different ways. We can also see the reinvention of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which is a complex monologue related to the models of the king’s “It’s a Puzzlement” in The King and I and, before that, Billy Bigelow’s iconic “Soliloquy” from Carousel (even if, in a broader sense, the idea is just as obviously borrowed from the big scena form of Italian opera). Still, it is the magnetic and complex relationship between Anna and the king which is the most important precedent for the portrayal of the connection between Higgins and Eliza.

The work of composers other than Rodgers also helped. Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948), for instance, is a loose musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Although the play is liberally interpreted through the lens of a backstage musical, substantial portions of Shakespeare’s verse remain intact thanks to the show’s meta-theatrical format. While Kiss Me, Kate was far from being the first Broadway musical based on a Shakespeare play, Porter and his collaborators’ fearlessness in using large sections of a classic piece of English literature is an obvious precedent for the retention of big portions of Shaw’s period dialogue in Fair Lady. This meant that Lerner and Loewe could confidently write a dialogue-heavy show, and thereby create characters who were psychologically complex and could engage in a complicated relationship.

The flip side is that it is less obvious to read My Fair Lady in the context of American society because of its English setting, and in this respect it is completely unlike many of the other shows of the period. Contrasts between the pastoral and the urban in Oklahoma! (1943), the representation of the Wild West in Annie Get Your Gun (1946), the depiction of trade unions in The Pajama Game (1954), baseball in Damn Yankees (1955), McCarthyism in Candide (1956), ethnic clashes in West Side Story (1957), small-town America in The Music Man (1957), the assimilation of Asian-Americans in Flower Drum Song (1958), and the dilution of Jewish religious traditions in Fiddler on the Roof (1964) are all examples of how the Broadway musical engaged directly with American society. Several of Lerner and Loewe’s other shows can be read in similar ways, too, be it the idolizing of an untouched historico-pastoral idyll by urban Americans in Brigadoon, the gold rush in Paint Your Wagon, or the posthumous association of the story of Camelot with the rise and fall of the John F. Kennedy administration.

However, My Fair Lady pursues a more latent “American” agenda in the form of the character of Eliza Doolittle. Like other Broadway classics, it has optimism at its centre. Whether during the boom of the 1920s (Gershwin’s Girl Crazy), the Depression of the 1930s (Porter’s Anything Goes), the Second World War (Berlin’s This is the Army), or the Cold War (Porter’s Silk Stockings), Broadway musicals had often provided either a reflection of the good times they were written in or a flicker of hope to overcome the bad times; in a broad sense, songs such as “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel or “Somewhere” from Bernstein and Sondheim’s West Side Story seem to epitomize much of what musicals are about. Eliza Doolittle is the ultimate Broadway musical heroine, therefore, because from start to finish she embodies the triumph of aspiration as well as being a representative of feminism, women’s suffrage, and social mobility—themes which chime with aspects of the American Dream such as getting rich, getting on in the world, and the equality of the sexes. Eliza’s first song, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?,” makes this connection clear at once, showing us that she wants to be warm and comfortable. Her line “I want to be a lady in a flower shop, ’stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road” (24), initially representing her goal in life, functions as a prominent leitmotif in the show because it is repeated on the gramophone record of Eliza’s voice that Higgins plays in the final scene (155). Higgins also refers to this ambition in act 2 during the great clash between the characters, when he says, “What about that old idea of a florist’s shop?” (111).27 She also remains a strong character in act 2, singing of her independence in “Without You” and demanding something more concrete than empty promises in “Show Me.” Thus the broader atmosphere is very much in keeping with other Broadway musicals of the period.

LOVE, AMBIGUITY, AND THE HIGGINS-ELIZA RELATIONSHIP

Still, the main reason why the show is so compelling is the brilliant depiction of the relationship between Higgins and Eliza. The tension between them is palpable from start to finish, yet at no point is it explicitly referred to as a signifier of love. This aspect of the piece is by far the one most often remarked upon by critics, and has been from its premiere; the disagreements as to whether the final scene represents romantic union between the two characters or mere reconciliation after a disagreement are constant. In contrast to some of the reviews such as Brooks Atkinson’s in the New York Times (see chap. 7), which perceived the show to depict a love story, the review in Variety by Hobe Morrison more cautiously referred to “the development of the romantic angle that Shaw scorned” without making it clear whether this “development” meant consummation.28 John Beaufort in the Christian Science Monitor gave a thorough account of how the musical’s book was adapted from the 1938 film of Pygmalion, complete with its “liberating revisions”: “Lerner winds up the story with a wry reunion between Eliza and Henry Higgins.”29 The resolution of the relationship can therefore be viewed in three different ways: overt romance (Atkinson), developed romance (Morrison), and “wry reunion” (Beaufort), the latter in particular the antithesis to Atkinson’s use of the word “love.”

Are Higgins and Eliza really in love, then? The fact is that Lerner and Loewe were careful to avoid discussion of the subject in the show.