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

reprise of “You Did It,” but it is also included in Outline 4, which even specifies that it is only a “short reprise.” So while Harrison may well have complained about the song during rehearsals, the juxtaposition of “Without You” with a reprise of “You Did It” was planned long before then. However, the copyist’s piano-vocal score and Bennett’s autograph full score both contain different versions of the text to the definitive published one.32

The lyrics to the draft versions are reproduced in Appendix 1. Put next to the published version, they show that the lyric was both refined and reduced in length. The number contains three key pieces of musical material: the jaunty main theme, concluding in “without you” each time (A); the smoother “You dear friend” theme on the flattened submediant (B); and the “Without your pulling it” theme—a kind of “slow tease” in which the tempo broadens before a sudden acceleration—in the subdominant (C). The first version follows the formal pattern ABACABA, with the second version foreshortening the penultimate return to the A melody and the final version dropping the second AB section. This excision left the song in a nicely rounded ABACA form (allowing for the fact that the later occurrences of A are not complete). It works particularly well because the most irate and harmonically twisted section (C) comes almost at the end, allowing Eliza’s anger to climax before being interrupted by Higgins; originally, the complete return to the A and B themes dissipated the anger.

It is also amusing to see Lerner’s alternative suggestions for all the things that Eliza could do without Higgins. As ever, the journey to the published version involved strong self-criticism; in most cases, the original lyric could easily have stayed in the show without anyone thinking amiss of it. Still, one can see why “I can thrill to a play without you” was deemed uncompelling, and “I can still have a dream / and it’s liable to seem / even more like a dream without you” is weakened by the repetition of the word “dream.” Likewise, “The world without your smiling face” does not have the impact of the equivalent section in the published version (starting “You dear friend”), because the melody is drawn out into half notes rather than quarter and eighth notes, thereby slowing down the progress of the melody.

By contrast, the “You dear friend” part works brilliantly because it is topped off by a quotation from Eliza’s lesson about “Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire,” a strong rejection of Higgins and his methods. This little stanza was also in the original version, where it appeared much later on. Some of the wording was modified, again to the enhancement of the overall effect. The original has “You, dear friend, can jolly well / Plumb go straight to…” but the final version makes both lines start with the same word, a strong verse technique known as anaphora. It is also significant that Lerner worked the issue of language into the published version—“You … who talk so well”—and it was an undeniable improvement to remove the rather antiquated “Plumb” from the lyric. The part about “fog” was weak merely because it was not particularly funny, while “niche” and “itch” make a glaring half-rhyme. Conversely, most of the stanza dealing with “laughing till it hurts” is fine and was probably removed simply to shorten the song. But the excision of “[I can] Be the mother of five without you” is surely significant. Here again there is irrefutable evidence of Lerner removing a reference to Eliza as Higgins’s lover—in this case, the bearer of his children, too—and therefore pushing the relationship in a deliberately ambiguous direction.

HIGGINS’S CHARM, HIGGINS’S ARROGANCE

Higgins’s four solo songs also portray different aspects of his character. Yet his songs often seem more layered and ambiguous than hers, largely because he can be both charming and dislikeable at the same time. For instance, “An Ordinary Man” and “A Hymn to Him” are repulsively misogynistic but also have a charismatic element to them, perhaps because it is difficult to resist feeling amused by Higgins’s unquestioning faith in himself.33 His position is so extreme that we assume he cannot quite mean it. Loewe’s musical portrayal of Higgins inclines to the elegant, too, especially in contrast to the earthier music associated with Eliza’s fury or Doolittle’s drunkenness. Apparently, this complexity was hard to come by. For example, no song from the show underwent as much modification during the compositional period as “Why Can’t the English?” At least four distinct versions survive, offering us an unusual insight into Lerner and Loewe’s thought processes, for instance, the use of a “loose” form in the verse to convey Higgins’s message, the depiction of several key aspects of Higgins’s character, the use of stylistic gestures to suggest location and mood, and, finally, the way in which this was achieved with relative brevity.

It comes as no surprise to learn that the song was extensively rewritten. In The Street Where I Live, Lerner describes how Rex Harrison was not happy with the original version, because “he said he felt he sounded like an inferior Noël Coward.” Lerner put the problem down to the rhyme scheme.34 Harrison confirms the story and specifies that it was “too reminiscent of ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’; it needed breaking down and changing, it had a too familiar tang. Well, that song was worked on and worked on. Right through rehearsal Fritz was still playing with it.”35 The sources confirm this description of the composition period, but Lerner’s explanation of the modification of the rhyme scheme does not account for several intermediate versions; nor does he mention the musical changes alluded to by Harrison.

However, he expanded on the subject of the song in a letter to Harrison on November 29, 1955. After promising to “rewrite it completely in a way that will be not only simpatico with you, but with the character of Higgins,” he explained his general attitude to musical theater songs:

There are “song songs” and