Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies), McHugh, Dominic [fantasy books to read TXT] 📗

“But his terror of the orchestra did not abate,” Lerner continues. “Late that afternoon with the house sold out and a fierce blizzard blowing, Rex announced that under no circumstances would he go on that night.” The performance was cancelled, and announcements were made on the local radio stations. However, “by six o’clock that evening hundreds of people had braved the snow and were already queuing up at the box office. The house manager was livid. He swore to us all that he would tell the world the truth. … About an hour and a half before what would have been curtain time Rex’s agent arrived from New York. … No matter what happened that evening on stage, he said, Rex damn well had to go on. Fear of the consequences must have overshadowed his fear of the orchestra because one hour before curtain time, Rex recanted.”168 So in the end, the show did begin that night of February 4 at 8:40 p.m. Although there were some technical difficulties with the turntables and curtains, Lerner says that “the total effect was stunning and when the curtain came down the audience stood up and cheered.”169Variety reviewed the show in its New Haven incarnation and reflected the reception that Lerner indicated, stating: “My Fair Lady is going to be a whale of a show … [It] contains enough smash potential to assure it a high place on the list of Broadway prospects.”170 Every aspect of the production came in for praise.

After playing in New Haven for a week, the show moved to Philadelphia for a four-week run at the Erlanger Theatre. In preparation for Philadelphia, three numbers were cut, making the running time around fifteen minutes shorter: Higgins’s “Come to the Ball,” the “Decorating Eliza” ballet, and Eliza’s “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight.” The reaction to the show continued to be phenomenal. Joseph M. Hyman, who looked after Moss Hart’s affairs, wrote to Philip Adler to say that he thought it would be the biggest hit for twenty years.171 Arnold Weissberger, Beaton’s New York lawyer, told Levin that after the adjustments being made to the show, “it now has a 50–50 chance (50 to run for five years and 50 to run for ten years).”172 The reviews of the opening night performance on Broadway, March 15, 1956, concurred with these early opinions: the Daily Mirror called it “one of the all-time great song-and-dancers”; the World-Telegram and Sun said that it “prance[d] into that rare class of great musicals”; and the Herald Tribune ordered the reader not “to finish reading this review now. You’d better sit right down and send for those tickets to My Fair Lady.” But perhaps the most unexpected praise came from Lawrence Langner, who had brought the project to Lerner and Loewe on behalf of the Theatre Guild in 1952 and then been shut out of it when they recommenced in 1954. “You remember Mary of Scotland’s line—‘After I am dead you will find Calais written upon my heart’—that is the way I will always feel about Pygmalion. But the perfect job you have done certainly mitigates my suffering. I can only congratulate you on the superb welding of all the component parts with the original so that they seem to be conceived and executed by one master mind.”173 Even those with an axe to grind could not resist the charm of My Fair Lady, and the show went on to be Lerner and Loewe’s greatest triumph—one which they would never come close to repeating.

3

SHAVIAN BUT NOT SHAW

DEVELOPING THE SCRIPT OF MY FAIR LADY

With My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe were taking on Shaw’s most popular and perhaps greatest comedy. Working out how to make the adaptation was undoubtedly the most difficult aspect of writing the show. In Pygmalion, Shaw struck a balance between promoting his socialist outlook and creating a humorous and human vehicle. He did this with an ease that even he did not always manage to equal, and his unquestionable brilliance provided an intimidating precedent for everyone who approached the property with a view to making it into a Broadway musical. No wonder so great a dramatist as Oscar Hammerstein 2nd was interested in Pygmalion, and no wonder he eventually gave it up. No wonder, either, that it was the English-educated and ingenious wordsmith Lerner who eventually succeeded in the task, which required someone who could assimilate Shaw’s vast, imposing, and provocative work into a musical that would be related to but independent of Pygmalion. This chapter explores the background to the play in brief, before referring to documentary sources that track Lerner and Loewe’s initial ideas about the format of the show. It then reveals how changes made to the text initially used in Fair Lady’s rehearsals resulted in a vital shift of focus in the Higgins-Eliza relationship, and finally goes on to explore the structure of the completed show.

SHAW AND PYGMALION

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on July 26, 1856—just a few months short of a century before the premiere of My Fair Lady—and moved to London in 1876.1 Though he did not quite share Eliza Doolittle’s plight in his upbringing, the fact that he left school at fifteen and relied heavily on acts of self-education—such as visiting galleries, concert halls and theaters, and reading Shakespeare—to better himself in the world was undoubtedly a motivating factor behind many of his plays, including Pygmalion. Obviously, it would be unjustifiable to perceive too strong a link between the two, but Shaw was hardworking, just like Eliza; unlike her, Shaw was able to benefit from financial support from a parent (his mother, who left her husband when Shaw was a teenager). He was also, of course, a unique figure in the history of literature and had a remarkable intellect. But in spite of this difference, there is no doubt that the portrayal of Eliza’s desperate financial circumstances, and the ongoing insecurity that this creates within her, came from deep within Shaw’s heart.