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

Corp to Levin, HLP, 25/1. Letter of January 10, 1956, Philip Alder to Miss Brown of Coro Jewelry, HLP, 24/13. Letter of January 10, 1956, Beaton to Levin and Sales Contract between Levin and the Helene Pons Studio, January 18, 1956, HLP, 35/4.

165. Contract of December 30, 1955, between The Liza Company and the New Haven Jewish Community Center, HLP, 24/3.

166. Lerner, Street, 94.

167. Ibid., 96.

168. Ibid., 97.

169. Ibid, 98.

170. Bone, “Shows Out of Town: My Fair Lady,” Variety, February 8, 1956, 56.

171. Letter of February 15, 1956, Hyman to Adler, HLP, 25/8.

172. Letter of February 23, Weissberger to Levin, HLP, 24/7.

173. Letter of June 8, 1956, Langner to Lerner, TGC, 83.

CHAPTER 3

1. Basic factual details about Shaw’s biography and the history of Pygmalion come from L. W. Conolly’s magnificent introduction to his scholarly edition of the play published in the New Mermaids series (London: Methuen, 2008) and Michael Holroyd’s seminal Bernard Shaw (one-volume ed., London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), unless otherwise stated.

2. Conolly, “Introduction: The Author,” in Pygmalion, xiv–xv.

3. Michael Holroyd reports on Shaw’s activities: “As early as September 1897 everything ‘has been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write … in which [Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson] shall be a west end gentleman and she an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers.’” Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 415–16.

4. Conolly, Pygmalion, xvii.

5. Tree “loved to disguise himself with beards, uniforms, vine leaves, eartrumpets. In this respect, Professor Higgins was a disappointment.” Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 441.

6. Conolly, Pygmalion, 74. Eliza’s line comes in response to Freddy’s question, “Are you walking across the park, Miss Doolittle?”

7. Conolly, Pygmalion, xxiv.

8. Ibid. 146.

9. Shaw, Complete Letters, vol. 3, 227–28.

10. Conolly, Pygmalion, xxvi.

11. “Sequel,” ibid., 129.

12. Pygmalion, 139–40.

13. Ibid., 132.

14. Ibid., 129–30.

15. Ibid., xxvii.

16. Ibid., 149.

17. Ibid., 150–51.

18. Ibid., 147.

19. Ibid., 154.

20. Ibid., 20.

21. The correspondence of Shaw and Pascal has been collected into a convenient volume edited by Bernard F. Dukore, with extensive reference to Pygmalion. Bernard F. Dukore, ed., Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal: Selected Correspondence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Dukore is also the editor of a beautiful volume of Shaw’s screenplays that discusses various versions of Pygmalion, including the foreign-language films. Bernard F. Dukore, ed., The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw (London: George Prior Publishers, 1980).

22. Pygmalion, xxviii.

23. Paul Bauschatz, “The Uneasy Evolution of My Fair Lady from Pygmalion ” in Fred D. Crawford, ed., The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, xviii (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998), 192 and 195. Curiously, Bauschatz also claims early on that “virtually all of My Fair Lady ’s dialogue can be found in Pygmalion,” but then goes on to relate various departures from Shaw’s text. Bauschatz, “Uneasy Evolution,” 181.

24. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 185.

25. Lerner, Street, 36.

26. “After a private showing of Pygmalion, [Lerner and Loewe] became enthusiastic.” V. Pascal, Disciple, 219.

27. Telegram of March 22, 1952, Langner to Pascal, TGC, box 137.

28. Letter of May 10, 1952, Lerner to Pascal, TGC, box 137.

29. Holroyd, 436. Holroyd also describes Doolittle as being “of Dickensian vitality.”

30. Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 409.

31. Dukore, Complete Screenplays of Bernard Shaw, 46.

32. “Lady Liza—Brief Outline,” HLP, 34/2.

33. One possibility is that Higgins was there doing “research,” and that Pickering simply arrived from India there, but if this was Lerner’s thinking, he does not say so here.

34. Pygmalion, 69.

35. My Fair Lady script, 91.

36. Lerner, Street, 99.

37. Outline 2 survives because it was included in an appendix to an early dissertation on the musical by Gerald Harold Weissman, who seems to have been given access to it by Lerner during the musical’s original Broadway run. Gerald Harold Weissman, “The musicalization of Pygmalion into My Fair Lady ” (master’s thesis, Stanford University, 1957).

38. Lerner, Street, 44.

39. My Fair Lady, “Mimeographed Rehearsal Script,” HLP, 34/7.

40. Kitty Carlisle Hart, Kitty: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 177; Bach, Dazzler, 341.

41. Page numbers in brackets in this chapter refer to the first British edition of the script of My Fair Lady (London, 1958). I use this edition because it contains a few corrections of typographical errors in the American first edition. References to “the published script” are to this British text.

42. Pygmalion, 11.

43. Ibid., 36.

44. Ibid., 73.

45. Though even after reinstating these lines, Lerner still did not merely lift the Pygmalion text. For instance, Shaw’s Higgins tells Mrs. Pearce to pay Eliza out of the housekeeping money, as well as reflecting tangentially about the difficulty of getting Eliza “to talk grammar.” Pygmalion, 37.

46. Ibid., 45.

47. Ibid., 78.

48. Pace Swain, who opines that “the lyrics no longer convey fantasy: Eliza now has the power to do what she says.” In fact, the opposite is the case, since Eliza has to run away in order to elude Higgins’s power, rather than enacting the violence described in the song. Swain, Broadway Musical, 190.

49. Ethan Mordden has noticed this aspect of the show, too: “[M]idway through Act One, there’s a sequence made of alternating song and dialogue that is generally conceded to be the point at which critics and public realized that My Fair Lady was not just very enjoyable but very special.” Ethan Mordden, Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 155.

50. Pygmalion, 7.

CHAPTER 4

1. See the outlines in chap. 3 for corroboration the position of these two songs. Location of the manuscripts in FLC: “What Is a Woman,” 5/25; “Who Is the Lady?,” 8/45; “Dear Little Fool,” 5/4; “Over Your Head,” 8/27, “Limehouse,” 8/20; and “The Undeserving Poor,” 8/40.

2. “What’s to Become of Me?,” FLC, 8/44. Eliza’s speech quoted from My Fair Lady script, 110.

3. FLC, 8/37.

4. “Who Is the Lady?” is not substantially different from this extract. In bars 3, 7, 35, and 39, D and E are written instead of E and F-sharp, and the melody ends with bar 46.

5. Lerner, Street, 57.

6. FLC,