LOVERLY
Geoffrey Block, Series Editor
Series Board
Stephen Banfield
Jeffrey Magee
Tim Carter
Carol Oja
Kim Kowalke
Larry Starr
“South Pacific”: Paradise Rewritten
Jim Lovensheimer
Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical
Charlotte Greenspan
To Broadway, to Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick
Philip Lambert
Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater
Jeffrey Magee
Loverly: The Life and Times of “My Fair Lady”
Dominic McHugh
LOVERLY
The Life and Times of My Fair Lady
DOMINIC McHUGH
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McHugh, Dominic.
Loverly: the life and times of My fair lady /Dominic McHugh.
p. cm.—(Broadway legacies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-982730-5
1. Loewe, Frederick, 1901–1988. My Fair Lady.
2. Lerner, Alan Jay, 1918–1986. My Fair Lady.
3. Musicals—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML410.L7986M34 2012
782.1′4—dc23 2011035377
Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the
AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society.
1 3 5 7 9 8 4 6 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For
MUM AND DAD
CONTENTS
Foreword by Geoffrey Block
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. False Starts and Artistic Promise
2. From Page to Stage: The Genesis of My Fair Lady
3. Shavian but Not Shaw: Developing the Script of My Fair Lady
4. Knowing the Score
5. Settling the Score: Part I
6. Settling the Score: Part II
7. Performance History: My Fair Lady On Stage
8. The Legacy of My Fair Lady
Appendix 1 “Without You” (early versions)
Appendix 2 “Why Can’t the English?” (original version)
Appendix 3 “On the Street Where You Live” (original version)
Appendix 4 Cut Material from “The Ascot Gavotte”
Appendix 5 “You Did It” cut passage
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Index
FOREWORD
When I received the proposal that would evolve into the book you are about to read, I immediately recalled Mozart’s apocryphal but no less prescient remark after meeting with the seventeen-year-old Beethoven: “Keep your eyes on him—someday he will give the world something to talk about.” The analogy may be imperfect, but Mozart’s prophecy remains fundamentally apt to describe the thoroughly accomplished young author of Loverly: The Life and Times of “My Fair Lady,” Dominic McHugh, of the University of Sheffield. Indeed, McHugh has produced the first comprehensive and most accurate account of how this great and perennially popular show came to be, and Loverly will give us much to talk about, just as the revered subject of this book has for generations added immeasurable wealth to the American musical treasury.
In telling the story of how Alan Jay Lerner (1918–86) and Frederick Loewe (1901–88) created what one opening night critic described as “a new landmark in the genre fathered by Rodgers and Hammerstein,” McHugh, in contrast to most of his predecessors, turns to Lerner’s 1978 memoir, The Street Where I Live “only where no other source exists.” Although never less than engaging and indispensable, and although we have grown accustomed to accepting Lerner’s recollections at face value, McHugh’s approach is a welcome one. By looking more closely at Lerner’s street—without, however, drawing comparisons with his stage characters as I am doing here—McHugh’s reliance on his documentary exploration reveals that Lerner’s memory shares much in common with that of Honoré and Mamita in Gigi, who think they “remember it well” but clearly do not. Among many polite but firm refutations in the course of Loverly, McHugh carefully points out that contrary to Lerner’s claim in his memoir, Mary Martin did appear to be a “natural” for the role of Eliza. Lerner wrote at the time that “everyone else after Mary has to be second choice” and that despite Lerner’s assertion Rex Harrison was the first choice for Higgins, in fact Lerner and Loewe approached both Noël Coward and Michael Redgrave before turning to Harrison.
Instead of following Lerner at every turn as most previous writers have done, McHugh offers a meticulous exploration of voluminous contemporary sources, including letters, memos, lyric and libretto drafts, and scores both discarded and replaced. The saga begins with the Theatre Guild (entirely omitted in Lerner’s expansive narrative) and its attempt to find a talented composer and lyricist, starting with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein in 1951, who had produced the great Guild hits Oklahoma! and Carousel (and the miss Allegro) in the 1940s. About a year after Rodgers and Hammerstein concluded, as Hammerstein later allegedly reported in a conversation with Lerner, that “it can’t be done,” the Guild solicited Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin before turning to Lerner for the book and lyrics and Loewe for the music. If I may borrow a song title from the completed show, they “did it.”
McHugh next details the two stages of Lerner and Loewe’s attempt to adapt Shaw’s Pygmalion, the abandoned project of 1952 and the successful second effort from 1954 to 1956 that led to the historic opening night March 15, 1956, which was produced by Herman Levin rather than the Theatre Guild. The next chapters look at Shaw’s original play of 1914, the 1938 film adaption directed by Gabriel Pascal that became the principal source for the stage version, Lerner’s outlines prior to script changes during the crucial rehearsal process, the development of the score based on a rich treasure of musical source material, and the finished show’s stage and film legacy to date. In his final chapter McHugh reviews selected commentary on My Fair Lady and offers a provocative and well-argued interpretation of “the nature of the ambiguous relationship between Eliza and Higgins.”
We don’t know if
