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

When My Fair Lady was nearing its third birthday on Broadway, Herman Levin approached various journalists with a standard letter, suggesting that they should write an editorial about the anniversary. The second paragraph of Levin’s letter in every case reads:

Though it is without kiss, embrace or tap dance, many authorities, exclusive of this partisan, think it is the best musical comedy ever produced in this country. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic have commended it for its taste, its freedom from vulgarity, and the fidelity with which is clings to the plot and dialogue of Shaw’s Pygmalion.30

Of course, these letters were not written for public consumption and were created for a commercial function, but Levin underlined an undeniable truth when he said that the show is without “kiss or embrace.” Their relationship is without physical or verbal confirmation of their love, surely a stumbling block for anyone who wants to read the final reunion of Eliza and Higgins as a capitulation to conventional romantic “happy endings”—whether in musical comedy, the lieto fine of eighteenth-century opera buffa, or the traditional conclusion to Shakespearean comedy, featuring the marriage of one or more couples. Ultimately, these precedents are probably what make people want to believe the show must end with the main characters in love.

The theme has been taken up in all the secondary literature on the musical. Joseph Swain, for instance, writes of “the transformation of Higgins, from a self-imagined misogynist to someone who has become accustomed to love a woman.”31 He then embarks on a detailed analysis of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” at one point highlighting broad similarities between the melodies of part of this song and Eliza’s “Just You Wait,” and goes on to ask: “Does this turnabout on the revenge motive imply a mutual affinity between the two protagonists, who have been portrayed so differently throughout?”32 He then has to admit, however, that the “relationship between Higgins and Eliza is developed with consistent subtlety—the word ‘love’ never comes between them—through the music of the play, which is, of course, the principal addition to Pygmalion. The tone of even their music is so understated that it demands a compromise of style: Lerner and Loewe forswear all serious devices of romantic expression that the Broadway tradition makes available to them, so that even ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’, the weightiest number of the play, is restrained in overt expression.”33 With good reason, Swain reads the show as subverting convention in terms of negating the need for a central romance—the word “love” never comes between them, he admits—so it is perhaps surprising that he should pursue the idea that Higgins is unambiguously in love with Eliza.

Swain is not alone in pursuing a romantic reading of the show. Geoffrey Block also assumes that the final scene represents “a romantic resolution between Higgins and Eliza” and asserts that “Despite Shaw’s desire to grasp at this perceived ambiguity and despite the fact that audiences of both film and musical do not actually see Eliza fetch Higgins’s slippers, most members of these audiences will probably conclude that Freddy is not a romantic alternative.”34 With good reason, Block describes how Higgins is softened as a character in the musical, perceiving this to be a way of grooming him as a more conventional “leading man” type and paving the way through “The Rain in Spain” to romance in the final scene. Certainly, this is a valid way of reading Lerner’s epigram to the published stage script, in which he explains that he omitted Shaw’s epilogue to Pygmalion “because in it Shaw explains how Eliza ends not with Higgins but with Freddy and—Shaw and Heaven forgive me!—I am not certain he is right.” Yet even Block admits that “Readers of Shaw’s play know, as Shaw knew, that Higgins would “never fall in love with anyone under forty-five” [a line of Mrs. Higgins’s from Pygmalion]. Indeed, marrying Freddy might have its drawbacks, but marrying Higgins would be unthinkable.”35 Block concludes by saying that the greatest achievement of My Fair Lady is that in it, “the unthinkable has become the probable.”

But is this happy ending really implied? What seems to confuse many writers is the odd progression of events leading to the finale. First, Eliza and Higgins meet and are poles apart in social rank and education. They unite as pupil and teacher, and the fact that Eliza takes up residence in Higgins’s house increases their level of intimacy above the norm. When she finally masters the language in the “Rain in Spain” scene, they sing and dance together, and in a song of triumph Eliza sings the lines, “I only know when he / Began to dance with me / I could have danced all night” (68). Other than this, Eliza never sings or speaks with joy about Higgins. Following the Ascot scene, the next step in their relationship is more tactile, when they are about to depart for the ball in act 1, scene 9. Eliza appears on the stairs in her evening gown, Pickering tells her she looks beautiful, and Higgins says that she is “Not bad. Not bad at all” (91). The stage directions tell us that as Higgins is at the threshold of the house, “he pauses, turns and gazes at Eliza. He returns to her and offers his arm. She takes it and they go out of the door, Pickering following after.” This represents an unprecedented gesture of respect from Higgins. He then dances with her at the ball in scene 11 (98), again taking their relationship to a new level with the act of touching.

But his self-congratulatory behavior in “You Did It” indicates that things have not significantly changed, and there is no suggestion here that Higgins might be in love with Eliza. He thanks God that the experiment is over (106); he says, “What does it matter what becomes of you?” (107); and he suggests that Eliza might get married, specifically to someone else (“I daresay my mother could