Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  In his book on Shaw’s films, The Serpent’s Eye, Donald P. Costello carefully details and explains how the printed screenplay departs from the actual film.38 Perhaps not surprisingly, the most dramatic departure between what was filmed and the published screenplay occurred at the work’s conclusion. This is what filmgoers saw and heard in the film:

  Eliza’s voice is heard coming out of the phonograph:

  ELIZA’S VOICE: Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!! I ain’t dirty: I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did.

  HIGGINS’s VOICE: I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

  ELIZA’S VOICE: Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo!

  HIGGINS’S VOICE: In six months … (Higgins switches off the phonograph. Close-up of Higgins’s sorrowful face.) Eliza enters the room, unseen by Higgins. He hears her voice, speaking with perfect lady-like diction, soft, gentle, lovingly.

  ELIZA: I washed my face and hands before I came.

  As Higgins turns to look at Eliza, the ballroom theme begins once more. Higgins looks at Eliza tenderly. Cut to a close-up of Eliza, looking back at him. Higgins just begins to smile; then he recollects himself, and says sternly, as the camera looks only at the back of his head:

  HIGGINS: Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?

  As the ballroom theme swells into a crescendo, a fade-out from the back of Higgins’s head. The lilting music of the ballroom waltz is heard as “The End” and the cast are flashed upon the screen.39

  Before the 1941 publication of the screenplay (as altered by Pascal), however, Shaw managed to have the last word. It appeared in a letter of corrections from August 19, 1939:

  MRS. HIGGINS: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be uneasy about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering.

  HIGGINS. PICKERING! NONSENSE: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! (He roars with laughter as the play ends.)

  After submitting this final ending, Shaw parenthetically inserted the following remark: “I should like to have a dozen pulls of the corrected page to send to the acting companies.”40

  When asked in an interview why he acquiesced to a “happy” ending in Pascal’s film, Shaw replied somewhat archly that he could not “conceive a less happy ending to the story of ‘Pygmalion’ than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower girl of 18.”41 According to Shaw, “nothing of the kind was emphasised in my scenario, where I emphasised the escape of Eliza from the tyranny of Higgins by a quite natural love affair with Freddy.” Shaw even goes so far as to claim that Leslie Howard’s “lovelorn complexion … is too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.” Despite Shaw’s desire to grasp at this perceived ambiguity and despite the fact that audiences of both film and musical do not actually see Eliza fetch Higgins’s slippers, most members of these audiences will probably conclude that Freddy is not a romantic alternative.

  Shaw’s denial to the contrary, the romanticization of Pygmalion introduced by Beerbohm Tree during the initial 1914 London run of the play was complete in the 1938 film. As Costello writes: “What remains, after a great deal of omission, is the clear and simple situation of a Galatea finally being fully created by her Pygmalion, finally asserting her own individual soul, and, becoming independent, being free to choose. She chooses Higgins.”42

  The stage was now set for My Fair Lady, where the phonetics lesson introduced in the film would be developed still further, Alfred P. Doolittle would be observed on his own Tottenham Court Road turf (and given two songs to sing there, one in each act), and a new and more colorful setting at Ascot would replace Mrs. Higgins’s home (act III of Shaw). Again following the film, My Fair Lady deleted many of Doolittle’s lines, especially his philosophical musing on middle-class morality.43

  If Lerner and Loewe did not invent a romantic pairing between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, they succeeded in contradicting Shaw still more completely (albeit more believably), a task made difficult by Higgins’s extraordinary misogyny, rudeness, and insensitivity in Shaw’s original play. Using the Pascal film as its guide, the Broadway Pygmalion therefore made Higgins less misogynist and generally more likable and Eliza less crude, more attractive, and more lovable than their counterparts in Shaw’s play and screenplay and Pascal’s film. Perhaps more significantly, Lerner and Loewe prepared the eventual match of Higgins and Eliza when they created two moments in song that depict their shared triumph, “The Rain in Spain” and Eliza’s gloriously happy “I Could Have Danced All Night” that shortly follows.

  Lerner and Loewe would also go beyond the film with several liberties of omission and commission to help musical audiences accept the unlikely but much-wished-for romantic liaison between the antagonistic protagonists. More important, not only did Lerner remove all references to Higgins’s “mother fixation,” but he gave Higgins compassion to match his brilliance. In order to achieve Higgins’s metamorphosis from a frog to a prince, Lerner added a speech of encouragement—a song would be overkill—not found in either the film or published screenplay. Significantly, it is this newly created speech that leads directly to Eliza’s mastery of the English language as she finally utters the magic words, “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” with impeccable and lady-like diction.44

  In this central speech, Higgins, in contrast to the play and screen versions, demonstrates an awareness of what his subject might be feeling and suffering: “Eliza, I know you’re tired. I know your head aches. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window.” After extolling the virtues of “the majesty and grandeur of the English language,” Higgins for the first time offers encouragement to his human experiment: “That’s what you’ve set yourself to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will…. Now, try it again.”45

  A Cinderella Musical with an Extraordinary Woman

  After conveying Higgins’s humanity by the end of act I, Lerner and Loewe tried in their second act to make musically explicit what Shaw implies or omits in his drama. Not only does Eliza now possess the strength and independence of “a consort battleship” admired by Higgins in Shaw’s play. After the Embassy Ball in My Fair Lady the heroine now in fact has the psychological upper hand as well. Clearly, Lerner and Loewe romanticized, and therefore falsified, Shaw’s intentions. At the same time they managed to reveal Eliza’s metamorphosis as Higgins’s equal through lyrics and music more clearly than either Shaw’s play or screenplay and Pascal’s film. The playwright lets Higgins express his delight in Eliza’s newfound independence, but he does not show how Eliza surpasses her creator (in this case Higgins) in psychological power other than by allowing Higgins to lose his composure (“he lays hands on her”). Lerner and Loewe accomplish this volte-face by taking advantage of music’s power to reveal psychological change. Simply put, the Broadway team reverse the musical roles of their protagonists.

  In act I of My Fair Lady, Eliza, in response to her initial humiliation prompted by her inability to negotiate the proper pronunciation of the letter “a” and to Higgins’s heartless denial of food (recalling Petruchio’s method of “taming” Kate in Kiss Me, Kate), sputters her ineffectual dreams of vengeance in “Just You Wait” (Example 12.1a).46 Eliza sings a brief reprise of this song in act II after Higgins and the uncharacteristically inconsiderate Pickering display a callous disregard for Eliza’s part in her Embassy Ball triumph (“You Did It”). Eliza will also incorporate the tune at various moments in “Without You,” for example, when she sings “And there still will be rain on that plain down in Spain” (Example 12.1b).

  My Fair Lady, act I, scene 5. Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison (“In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.”) (1956). Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection. Gift of Harold Friedlander. For a film still of this scene see p. 321.

  Example 12.1. “Just You Wait” and selected transformations

  (a) “Just You Wait”

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p; (b) “Without You”

  (c) “I’m an Ordinary Man”

  (d) “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”

  The opening phrase of the chorus in “Without You,” Eliza’s ode to independence, consists of a transformation into the major mode of “Just You Wait.” Its first four notes also inconspicuously recall Higgins’s second song of act I, “I’m an Ordinary Man,” when he first leaves speech for song on the words “who desires” (Example 12.1c). By this subtle transformation, audiences can subliminally hear as well as directly see that the tables have begun to turn as Eliza adopts Higgins’s musical characteristics. At the same time Higgins transforms Eliza into a lady, by the end of the evening Eliza (and her music) will have successfully transformed Higgins into a gentleman.

  To reinforce this dramatic reversal, Higgins himself recapitulates Eliza’s “Just You Wait” material in both the minor and major modes of his final song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (Example 12.1d). At this point in the song Higgins is envisaging the “infantile idea” of Eliza’s marrying Freddy.47 The verbal and dramatic parallels between Higgins’s and Eliza’s revenge on their respective tormentors again suggest the reversal of their roles through song.

  Higgins’s “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” in act II also offers a musical demonstration of a dramatic transformation needed to convince audiences that Eliza’s return is as plausible as it is desirable. In the fast sections of “I’m an Ordinary Man” in act I, Higgins explains the discomforting effect of women on his orderly existence (Example 12.2a). Higgins’s dramatic transformation in his final song is most clearly marked by tempo and dynamics, but the melodic change is equally significant if less immediately obvious.48 As shown in Example 12.2b, no longer does Higgins move up an ascending scale to reach his destination like a “motor bus” (Eliza’s description in Shaw’s act V). For one thing, the destination of the opening line, “She almost makes the day begin,” is the fourth degree of the scale (F in the key of C) on the final syllable rather than the first degree. For another, Higgins now precedes the resolution with the upper note G to soften the momentum of the ascending scale. Thus a lyrical Higgins, who sings more and talks less, conveys how he misses his Eliza. Eventually within the song this lyricism (to be sung con tenerezza or tenderly) will conquer the other side of his emotions, embodied in his dream of Eliza’s humiliation.

  The reuse of “Just You Wait” and the transformation of the “but let a woman in your life” portions of “I’m an Ordinary Man” into “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” provide the most telling musical examples of Higgins’s dramatic transformation. The far less obvious transformation of “I’m an Ordinary Man” into “Without You” mentioned earlier (Example 12.1c) provides additional musical evidence of the power reversal between Higgins and Eliza in the second act of My Fair Lady.49

  Example 12.2. “I’m an Ordinary Man” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”

  (a) “I’m an Ordinary Man”

  (b) “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”

  Although they lack the immediate recognizability of these melodic examples, the most frequent musical unities are rhythmic ones, with or without attendant melodic profiles. The middle section of “Just You Wait,” for example, anticipates the rhythm of “Get Me to the Church on Time” (Example 12.3). The eighteenth-century Alberti bass in the accompaniment of this section, which suggests the propriety of classical music, is also paralleled in the second act song of Eliza’s father when he decides to marry and thereby gain conventional middle-class respectability.

  It is possible that Lerner and Loewe intended to link the central characters rhythmically by giving them songs that begin with an upbeat. In act I, both parts of Higgins’s “Ordinary Man,” the main melody of Doolittle’s “A Little Bit of Luck,” and Eliza’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” all begin with three-note upbeats. Eliza’s “Just You Wait,” Freddy’s “On the Street Where You Live,” and “Ascot Gavotte” each open with a two-note upbeat and “The Rain in Spain” employs a one-note upbeat.

  Dramatic meaning for all these upbeats may be found by looking at the two songs in act I that begin squarely on the downbeat, “Why Can’t the English?” and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” Significantly, these songs, the first two of the show, are rhetorical questions sung by Higgins and Eliza, respectively, before their relationship has begun. Clearly Higgins, in speaking about matters of language and impersonal intellectual matters, plants his feet firmly on solid ground. Similarly, the strong downbeats of Eliza’s opening song demonstrate her earthiness and directness. Once Higgins has encountered Eliza in his study and sings “I’m an Ordinary Man,” Lerner and Loewe let us know that Higgins is on less firm territory and can no longer begin his songs on the downbeat. After Eliza begins her lessons with Higgins, she too becomes unable to begin a song directly on the downbeat. As Doolittle becomes conventional and respectable, he too will begin respectably on the downbeat in his second-act number, “Get Me to the Church On Time.”50

  Example 12.3. “Just You Wait” and “Get Me to the Church on Time”

  (a) “Just You Wait” (middle section)

  (b) “Get Me to the Church on Time” (opening)

  Although Eliza transforms Higgins’s “Ordinary Man” in “Without You,” complete with upbeat, moments later she manages to demonstrate to Freddy that she can once again begin every phrase of a song on the downbeat, as she turns the Spanish tango of “The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain” into the faster and angrier Latin rhythms of “Show Me.” Tellingly, Higgins never regains his ability to begin a song on the downbeat. Especially revealing is his final song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which retains the three-note upbeat of his own “Ordinary Man” (“but let a woman in your life”) and Eliza’s euphoric moment in act I, “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

  During the New Haven tryouts a few songs continued to present special problems. One of these songs, “Come to the Ball,” Lerner and Loewe’s second attempt to give Higgins a song of encouragement for Eliza prior to the Embassy Ball, was dropped after one performance.51 Although Lerner never seemed to accept its removal, his more objective collaborators, Loewe and especially director Moss Hart, understood why the show works better for its absence: while it endorses Eliza’s physical beauty, it simply does not offer her any other reason to attend the ball. Despite the current predilection of reinstating deleted numbers from Broadway classics, it seems unlikely that audiences will soon be hearing “Come to the Ball” in its original context.

  The crucial role of Hart (the librettist of Lady in the Dark) in the development of Lerner’s book should not go unnoticed. Even if the full extent of his contribution cannot be fully measured, Lerner readily acknowledged that the director went over every word with the official librettist over a four-day marathon weekend in late November 1955.52 Several of Hart’s major suggestions during the rehearsal and tryout process can be more accurately gauged. In addition to his requesting the deletion of “Come to the Ball,” we know from Lerner’s autobiography that Hart persuaded Lerner and Loewe to remove “a ballet that occurred between Ascot and the ball scene and ‘Say a Prayer for Me Tonight.’”53 To fill the resulting gap near the end of act I, Lerner “wrote a brief scene which skipped directly from Ascot to the night before the ball.”54

  The other major song marked for extinction after opening night in New Haven was “On the Street Where You Live.” In both his autobiography and “An Evening with Alan Jay Lerner” presented at New York’s 92nd Street Y in 1971, Lerner discussed the negative response to this song, his own desire to retain it, his failure to understand why it failed, and his solution to the problem several days later.55 For Lerner, the “mute disinterest” that greeted this song was due to the fact that audiences were unable to distinguish Freddy Eynesford-Hill from the other gentlemen at Ascot.56 Lerner’s autobiography relates how he gave Freddy a new verse to help audiences remember him; in his “Evening” at the Y, Lerner ex
plains a revision in which for the sake of clarity Freddy has the maid ask him to identify himself by name. In Lerner’s view the positive response to this change was vindication enough. Certainly “On the Street Where You Live” remains the most frequently performed song outside the context of the show.

  The rich afterlife of “On the Street Where You Live” as an independent song may provide a clue as to why everyone else concerned with the show (other than Lerner) was willing, even eager, to cut this future hit after it failed to register on its opening night audience. Lehman Engel, an astute and sensitive Broadway critic and a staunch proponent of the integrated musical, writes that when he sees a musical for the first time “the highest compliment anyone can pay is to not be conscious of the songs.”57 The absence of such awareness “indicates that all of the elements worked together so integrally that I was aware only of the total effect.”

  Engel’s reaction to My Fair Lady expresses the problem clearly:

  I had a similar response to My Fair Lady the first time [that like Fiddler on the Roof, the elements worked integrally], but I did hear “On the Street Where You Live” and I believe this happened for two reasons. In the first place, nothing else was going on when the song was sung; the singing character was simply (and intentionally) stupid—nothing complex about that.58 But secondly I heard the song because I disliked it intensely. (I love everything else in the score. But this song, to me, did not fit.) It was the picture that shoved its way out of the frame with a bang. Suddenly there was a “pop” song that had strayed into a score otherwise brilliant, integrated, with a great sense of the play’s own style and a faithful, uncompromising exposition of characters and situations.