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

much more of an extrovert “Broadway” feel to it, and with this would probably have come a more conventionally romantic relationship between the two main protagonists.

Certainly, many of the initial attempts at writing songs for the show were in line with this. Sketches for numbers such as “What is a Woman?” and “The Undeserving Poor” suggest generic Broadway numbers, while the complete lead sheet for “Please Don’t Marry Me” shows that both the lyric and the music for this song deals with the subject of love in a more head-on way than is the case in “I’m an Ordinary Man.” Eliza’s “There’s a Thing Called Love” is similar in this respect, and the fact that the music for the number was recycled in the stage version of Gigi as a full-blown love song indicates that Lerner and Loewe did not want Eliza to have quite the same kind of romantic number that someone like Gigi sings; the avoidance of such a number is also shown in the removal of the sentimental “Shy” from the score late in the compositional process. Even more strikingly, Higgins refers to Eliza as becoming “my lady” in the unused song “Lady Liza,” a direct nomination of her as his consort. The removal of the long sequence in act 1 (“Come to the Ball,” the ballet, and “Say a Prayer”) was largely due to the running time of the previews in New Haven, but it also served an interpretative purpose. “Come to the Ball” was intensely seductive and featured Higgins persuading Eliza to do his will, again in waltz-time, again with reference to himself as consort (“Come to the ball with me”), while the original lyric for “Say a Prayer” had Eliza singing such sentiments as “If I were a work of art / Would I wake his sleeping heart?” and “Say a prayer that he’ll discover / I’m his lover.” That this material did not make it into the show is no accident.

Lerner and Loewe undertook this sort of anti-romantic modification even in the songs that remained in the score at the musical’s Broadway opening. For instance, changes to “On the Street Where You Live” helped soften the impact of Freddy as a feasible suitor to Eliza, whereas the original had more actively posited him as a rival to Higgins for her affections. The removal of some of the more sadistic lines in “You Did It” helped prevent demonizing Higgins to too much of an extent, so that we understand his attitude in the number as simply not noticing Eliza, rather than being actively nasty, while Eliza’s “Without You” was similarly toned down from its original extended version. It was important not to make either character seem too actively furious at the other, since this is traditionally a signifier of people who exaggerate their hatred of each other to mask the fact that they are in love (classic Shakespearean examples being Katherine and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, and Benedict and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing).

Additionally, it is notable that the songs that stayed in the show tend to avoid being too specific where they could have been overt expressions of love. For instance, “Why Can’t the English?” contains some initial addresses to Eliza but broadens out to include the crowd (and indeed people from all over the world). Eliza’s equivalent opening statement, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” talks about “Someone’s head resting on my knee” but does not refer to anyone specific, and it would certainly be difficult to register this as an allusion to Higgins. “I’m an Ordinary Man” expresses a negative attitude toward women but does not involve Eliza directly (nor does it discuss romance or matrimony, for that matter), while the more direct “Just You Wait” comes so obviously in the aftermath of Higgins’s strict treatment of her as his pupil that it would take a stretch of the imagination to receive it as an “anti-love” love song. As noted above, “Show Me” is sung not to Higgins but to Freddy, so that the brief mention of the Professor in Eliza’s opening verse (“I get words all day through / First from him, now from you”) goes by relatively unnoticed. She has sickened of the behavior of men in general, and there is little sense of Freddy acting as an object against whom Eliza can vent her anger toward Higgins in the physical absence of the latter. Similarly subtle is the brief reference to him in the line “I only know when he / Began to dance with me” from “I Could Have Danced All Night”: certainly it strikes us that some kind of feeling has been aroused inside Eliza, but the thought is so fleeting that we cannot conclude too much from it.

Lerner and Loewe delay confrontation of the issue until the pair’s last two songs, when Eliza sings that she can live “Without You,” and Higgins admits that “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Along with “I Could Have Danced All Night,” the latter is surely the only strong reason to infer a romantic connection between the two: lines such as “She almost makes the day begin” and “I’ve grown accustomed to the trace of something in the air” undoubtedly represent a very personal expression of feeling for Eliza on Higgins’s part. Yet Lerner never takes either of them any farther than this. Whereas song is traditionally a conduit through which a character’s heightened emotions can flow, in My Fair Lady the musical numbers contribute to the grander scheme of creating a central relationship whose full implications we can never fully understand.

Julie Andrews in the final scene of My Fair Lady (Photofest)

In other words, the triumph of My Fair Lady is not its resolution of the romance between Higgins and Eliza but that Lerner and Loewe resolve the characters’ ongoing battle without defining their relationship any more explicitly than it has been earlier in the show. It is a stroke of genius: because the argument