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

But the comparisons between My Fair Lady and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals tend to rob Lerner and Loewe of some of their individuality. This was the case from the very beginning. In his review of the opening night of the show on Broadway, Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror wrote that it was “a new landmark in the genre fathered by Rodgers and Hammerstein.”5 Immediately, this put the show under the shadow of the earlier team’s output. Coleman went on to specify the elements of Fair Lady that particularly owed themselves to the supposed “Rodgers and Hammerstein model”: “The Lerner-Loewe songs are not only delightful, they advance the action as well. They are ever so much more than interpolations or interruptions. They are a most important and integrated element in about as perfect an entertainment as the most fastidious playgoer could demand.” This attitude has continued in the more recent secondary literature on Lerner and Loewe. For instance, Scott McMillin says that “the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein … is also the world of Lerner and Loewe.”6 Similarly, Thomas L. Riis and Ann Sears write that My Fair Lady has elements in common with “all the important Rodgers and Hammerstein shows” and uses “the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula.”7 The problem here is not that these and other writers are wrong, but that they capitulate to the canonic pull of Rodgers and Hammerstein rather than assessing the show on its own merit.

It is not just the shadow of Rodgers and Hammerstein that has been cast over the reception of My Fair Lady: that of George Bernard Shaw also continues to cloud the extent to which Lerner and Loewe are given credit for their work. The Shavian connection promotes an element of snobbery in the show’s public profile, so that it has been seen as a cut above the average musical comedy simply because of its source material. In part, this has done My Fair Lady a service because it has given it the status of something almost approaching high culture, but it is also the reason why the perception that Shaw remains the brains behind the show first emerged. It is also perhaps the case that since productions of Pygmalion tend to resemble My Fair Lady in a broad sense—with period costumes and a study and library set, for instance—people might think that they have seen it all before, without initially realizing the rigorous job done by Lerner and Loewe in reworking the play on every level. This notion was cleverly anticipated by Al Hirschfeld in his now-iconic caricature of the show, which featured on the playbills and cast album. This image is associated more than any other with My Fair Lady. Not only is Higgins portrayed as the puppeteer, manipulating Eliza’s every move, but Shaw himself is in charge of proceedings in the clouds, rising above as the master magician, as it were. Strikingly absent from the image are Lerner and Loewe, and the question Hirschfeld might be asking is, whose strings is Shaw really pulling—Higgins’s and Eliza’s or Lerner’s and Loewe’s?

Likewise, most of the reviews of the opening night on Broadway focused strongly on the way in which Lerner and Loewe had adapted Pygmalion for the musical stage (see chap. 7). Often, there is a tension between wanting to apologize for Lerner and Loewe’s near-sacrilege in taking on the task in the first place and at the same time awarding Fair Lady extra kudos for its association with Shaw. Then again, perhaps the fact that the show strove to adapt Shaw’s play as a piece of music theater rather than creating a brash piece of entertainment helped audiences to engage closely with the material. My Fair Lady is like other shows of its day in being a so-called book musical, with a strong storyline and script that give rise to plot-clinching songs and dances, but the way in which the book has achieved as legendary a status as the score has always made it stand out. Unusually for a musical, the script has never been out of print, and it has even been published in a volume side by side with Pygmalion—an especially singular move to bring a script of a musical and its source material together—as well as in an inexpensive paperback edition for popular use.8

The type of theater it constitutes has always struck critics and audiences as particularly absorbing. Brooks Atkinson’s first-night review, for instance, mentions that “My Fair Lady is staged dramatically on a civilized plane. Probably for the first time in history a typical musical comedy audience finds itself absorbed in the art of pronunciation and passionately involved in the proper speaking of ‘pain’, ‘rain’ and ‘Spain.’”9 The Newark Evening News reported that “The gaily perceptive Shavian fable of a Cockney flower vendor’s transition into a lady of articulate charm by a bemused mentor of phonetics loses none of its classical zest in this retelling,” a comment that promotes most avidly the idea that the articulate power of Pygmalion is maintained in My Fair Lady.10 The reviewer in Newsweek claimed that “Shaw’s pervasively witty malice guides their totality [i.e., the combined talent of Lerner, Loewe, Smith, and Beaton] toward something that is very close to great theater,” while Time magazine said that the musical retains “all of Shaw’s hardy perennial bloom.”11 More recently, Edward Jablonski, Stephen Citron, Geoffrey Block, and Scott McMillin have also focused strongly on the Shavian element of the show, demonstrating the irresistible pull of the very British Pygmalion on the reception of My Fair Lady.12

Julie Andrews (Eliza) and Rex Harrison (Higgins) in the final scene from My Fair Lady (Photofest)

The third leading trend in the literature on the show concerns genre. In spite of opening on Broadway and being the product of a composer and lyricist whose careers centered around American musical theater, My Fair Lady has too often been interpreted as