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

wider social commentary within the show; his previous life was one of freedom, whereas financial security has entailed social burden—a direct contradiction to Higgins’s philosophy, where the Cockney dialect binds the working classes and clear diction facilitates social liberation. The other addition to the speech follows the news that Doolittle is to be married to “Eliza’s stepmother”: “She wouldn’t have married me before if she’d had six children by me. But now I am respectable. Now she wants to be respectable. Middle-class morality claims its victims” (RS, 2-3-17). Again, Doolittle reinforces the idea of his social shift as being something imprisoning rather than giving him an opportunity, describing himself as a “victim” and making it clear that social respectability (not love or affection) is the reason for the marriage.

Table 3.5.Outline 4

Initiating the Eliza-Higgins Relationship

The all-important battle between Higgins and Eliza was intensified throughout the script during rehearsals. In act 1, scene 3, Lerner added several lines after Mrs. Pearce’s question about whether Eliza is to be paid for taking part in the experiment. Higgins claims that Eliza will “only drink if you give her money,” much to her indignation; she appeals to Pickering, who comes to her defense and asks whether it occurs to Higgins that Eliza “has some feelings.” The Professor replies that he does not think she has “any feelings that we need bother about,” but Mrs. Pearce interjects and asks him to “look ahead a little” (PS, 30–31). Yet again, these lines show Lerner going back to Shaw’s text to add nuance to the musical.45

Higgins’s character is further developed in his song, “I’m an Ordinary Man.” The dialogue leading into the number was changed quite substantially during the rehearsal period. In particular, his original line, “Do I look like the kind of person who roams about anxiously searching for some woman to upset his life?” (RS, 1-3-25), is noticeable in the way that Higgins seems to reject the idea of having a female lover at all. The replacement is less clear-cut, relating a history of relationships with women that have gone badly as the reason for his bachelorhood: “I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself become friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so” (PS, 35). Unusually, this is an example of PS making Higgins’s possible status as a lover more tantalizing, rather than more obscure.

The revised speech is quite an improvement, because Higgins bares his soul in an unprecedented fashion, and thereby reveals his emotional repression: his relations with the opposite sex have been a disaster, and in his way he has been damaged by them. As before, Lerner reinstates several lines from Shaw. But he still omits the following statement of Higgins’s: “You see, she’ll be a pupil; and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred. I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood.”46 It is no accident that these lines were omitted from My Fair Lady: Lerner’s Higgins cannot exaggerate his immunity to the opposite sex if the musical’s ambiguous treatment of the Higgins-Eliza relationship is to be effective.

Two scenes later, the subject of Higgins’s relationship with Eliza is again discussed openly, this time by Doolittle just before he departs the house: “I don’t know what your intentions is, Governor, but if you’ll take my advice you’ll marry Eliza while she’s young. If you don’t, you’ll be sorry for it after. But better her than you, because you’re a man and she’s only a woman and don’t know how to be happy anyhow” (RS, 1-5-36, partly based on Pygmalion, 56). This was later altered to a shorter speech in which Doolittle advises Higgins simply to give Eliza “a few licks of the strap” if he has any trouble with her. Originally, however, Doolittle explicitly states his assumption that Higgins desires Eliza. Such a line seems oddly out of place in the musical, but it makes sense in the context of other comments from RS, in which a union between Higgins and Eliza seems almost inevitable. So different was its tone, in fact, that Higgins does not even react to Doolittle’s comment about marrying Eliza. That Lerner changed this only during rehearsals suggests that the shift to romantic ambiguity was not yet complete.

The next person to inquire about Higgins’s business with Eliza is his mother. In the original act 1, scene 6, Higgins and his mother discuss the experiment outside the race course; but the final version has Pickering in Higgins’s place. The most surprising part of the RS version of the exchange is when Mrs. Higgins asks, “Henry, do you know what you would do if you really loved me?” and Higgins replies, “Marry, I suppose” (RS, 1-6-51). It seems that even during the rehearsal period, the subject of Higgins’s possible matrimony was still openly discussed between the two characters, positing the Professor more overtly as a romantic lead. Later in the scene, Mrs. Higgins raises the issue again, asking where Eliza lives and on what terms she lives there (RS, 1-6-51). Higgins replies that she is “very useful,” “knows where things are,” and “remembers my appointments.” But, he concedes, “she’s there to be worked at.” Higgins confesses it’s his “most absorbing experiment” to date and that he thinks about Eliza “even in my sleep.” An element of this exchange was brought back for the film version of the show, in which a scene is added outside Ascot after the race and Higgins admits that he and Pickering are “at it from morning until night … teaching Eliza, talking to Eliza, listening to Eliza, dressing Eliza…” But in addition, Higgins