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

day. Interestingly, this is in contrast to the published version of Shaw’s stage play, which is comparatively vague regarding time and date (see table 3.9).50 In light of this, Lerner’s structure is especially well conceived, with the show working in three discreet periods of time. The first act is in three sequences: the meeting of Eliza and Higgins and their initial lessons during March (scenes 1–5); Ascot in July (scenes 6–8); and the Embassy Ball in late August/early September (scenes 9-11). This provides a three-part exposition in which the establishment of the bet and its early consequences (the Ascot and Embassy scenes) are depicted, leaving the second act in which to discuss the resolution of Higgins’s and Eliza’s problematic relationship. That makes the timescale of the second act all the more important: it takes place over the course of a single day and follows on directly from the end of act 1, with scenes at 3 a.m., 5 a.m., 11 a.m., during the afternoon, and at dusk. Obviously, there is a dramatic push to this format, whereby the scenes almost occur in real time and provide a sense of continuity. By setting the action against this “cycle of the hours,” Lerner ensured that the second act had just as much momentum—if not more—than the first. It is also ingenious that the day of the ball and the immediate aftermath straddles the intermission, thereby providing a “cliff-hanger” about whether the experiment has been successful—another sign of the master of the theater at work.

Table 3.9.Outline of Timescale of Acts in Pygmalion

4

KNOWING THE SCORE

A MUSICAL PYGMALION

The fact that the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein abandoned their adaptation of Pygmalion makes Lerner and Loewe’s achievement in My Fair Lady all the more impressive. This was a show that confounded even the very best, partly because of the multifaceted challenge of writing a musical based on this particular play. Just as the evolution of Lerner’s script involved a shift of focus from Shaw’s determinedly unromantic view of the Higgins-Eliza relationship to something more ambiguous for the musical, a change of gesture also had to be carried through in the score. This created a semiotic problem for the composer: how to avoid writing standard types of Broadway songs but remain within the recognized bounds of the Broadway musical. Yet one of Loewe’s gifts as a composer was his ability to adopt a wide range of styles. Nor was this limited to broad stylistic gestures such as the “Celtic” music in Brigadoon or hints of the Wild West in Paint Your Wagon: Loewe’s musicals are written with a fine brush, allowing him to conjure up place, character, and mood within the space of a single song.

This is especially true of My Fair Lady. But in order to discuss the show’s score, it is essential first to understand the nature of the material available. Although studies of musicals typically use published piano reductions of orchestral scores as the basis for their analyses, these commercially available scores usually represent only a retrospective snapshot of what was performed on Broadway. Rarely are all the expressive aspects of a performance represented, nor is the complexity of the compositional process normally clear from a homogenized score. Typically, the composer would write either a simple piano-vocal score or a lead sheet with chord symbols (or even just create the piece at the keyboard in the case of composers who could not notate music). This would then be adapted and expanded by an arranger according to factors such as the number of verses that appeared in the final script or the need for dance music, before the orchestrators fleshed out the material and expanded the texture for a full complement of instruments. At best, published vocal scores might partly be based on the composer’s initial manuscripts, but taken as a whole they are normally extrapolated from either the full score or the conductor’s short score after the event, and therefore bear a comparatively remote relationship to the stage performances.

In the case of My Fair Lady, the musical artifacts (mostly derived from the Frederick Loewe and Warner-Chappell Collections at the Library of Congress) can be divided into the following categories:

• Untitled melodic sketches in Loewe’s hand, without lyrics, which can be identified as now-familiar songs;

• Completed melodies in Loewe’s hand, without accompaniment, which may or may not have lyrics attached and may not ultimately have made it into the finished show;

• Completed piano-vocal scores wholly or partly in Loewe’s hand for both familiar and cut songs; the verses may be absent or only one verse may appear, compared to multiple verses in the published vocal score;

• Vocal and choral scores of intermediate and final versions of some of the songs in unknown copyists’ hands;

• Piano scores (some of them representing intermediate versions) of dance music, incidental music, vocal reprises, and instrumental numbers in the handwriting of Trude Rittmann, the dance arranger;

• Full orchestral scores in the hands of the credited orchestrators, Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J Lang, as well as the ghost orchestrator, Jack Mason;

• Instrumental performing parts and conductor’s short scores in unknown copyists’ hands;

• Two editions of the published vocal score: the original, edited by the show’s conductor, Franz Allers (1956), and a corrected revision (1969).

In addition, lyric sheets containing versions of the texts of the songs not documented elsewhere are discussed where relevant. These come from two sources: a folder in Herman Levin’s papers, and an envelope marked “Franz Allers Lyrics” hidden in the middle of a pile of instrumental parts for the show in the Warner-Chappell Collection.

No song or number is represented by a source or sources from all of these categories, nor should it be assumed that there ever were documents for each song in every category. For instance, songs such as “I Could Have Danced All Night” were created late in the compositional process and were probably written down as relatively complete numbers first time around, so there might never have been