Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies)

by McHugh, Dominic

  Ex. 4.6. “Shy,” Loewe version.

  Ex. 4.7. “Shy,” Loewe-Rittmann version.

  Exactly why a second accompaniment was written for “Shy” is unknown, but it may be because, as Andrews implies, a sentimental love song was incoherent in light of the unspoken affection between Higgins and Eliza. Perhaps before discarding Lerner’s lyric, which is indeed overt in its expression of love, Loewe either decided to refit the music in a new character, or he commissioned Rittmann to do so. It is clear even in the first bar of the “new” version that the melody is now matched with a beguine accompaniment, which to an extent numbs the triteness of the lyric. At the same time, the liveliness of the new accompaniment rhythms does not cohere well with the open sincerity of the words. It is little wonder, therefore, that “Shy” was not used. Even had the material been top-drawer Lerner and Loewe, the flagrant admission that Eliza is in love with Higgins is out of place in a musical where romance simmers only quietly in the background.

  “SAY A PRAYER FOR ME TONIGHT,” DRESS BALLET, AND “COME TO THE BALL”

  One of the most intriguing aspects of the show’s genesis is the sequence of numbers that originally bridged the gap between Ascot and the Embassy Ball but was later replaced by a short passage of dialogue. All sources agree that the first act of the musical was too long during its first performance in New Haven, motivating Lerner, Loewe and Moss Hart to remove “Come to the Ball,” the “Dress Ballet” and “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” and thereby excise roughly fifteen minutes from the running time.21 The three cut numbers are at once familiar and unknown. They were performed in New Haven, “Come to the Ball” was recorded, and “Say a Prayer For Me Tonight” was reused in the film of Gigi. But many of the sources related to these numbers have not previously been examined or written about, and the “Dress Ballet” is especially obscure. The rest of this chapter pieces together archival material to present an appraisal of this cut scene, which was originally planned to be among the show’s highlights.

  “Come to the Ball”

  According to Lerner, “Come to the Ball” (see ex. 4.8) was intended to be Harrison’s pièce de résistance, but after its first performance the lyricist deemed it “a disaster in three-quarter time.”22 The piece exists in several different versions: (1) Loewe’s autograph, which is in E major, contains only the first refrain and is very simply harmonized; (2) a copyist’s vocal score in D major (the final key) from the Loewe Collection, lightly annotated by the composer and representing an intermediate version of the song, with different transition music between the second refrain and interlude, and a different ending; and (3) a modified version of the same copyist’s score, the conductor’s short score, and the orchestrator’s autograph full score, all of which come from the Warner-Chappell Collection and represent the definitive version.23

  Ex. 4.8. “Come to the Ball,” beginning.

  Ex. 4.9. “Come to the Ball,” interlude.

  The song’s lyric shows an unusual side of Higgins’s personality. We are used to him insulting and patronizing Eliza, declaring that she has “no feelings that we need worry about,” telling Mrs. Pearce to “put her in the dustbin,” and calling her a “draggle-tailed guttersnipe.”24 The only exception is in act 1, scene 3, when Eliza is on the brink of leaving before the experiment has even started and Higgins tempts her with “chocolates, and taxis, and gold, and diamonds.”25 But otherwise, the language employed in “Come to the Ball” is more overtly seductive than Higgins’s normal mode of expression. He conjures up for Eliza various images of the men who await her at the ball—a dashing marquis and a bored lord—and says “it wouldn’t be fair … to deny them all the dreams you’ll provide them.” For instance, the song begins:

  Come to the ball! Come to the ball!

  It wouldn’t be fair to the men who are there

  To deny them

  All the dreams you’ll supply them.

  There even may be a dashing marquis

  Who feature by feature will swear you’re the creature

  He always prayed for,

  Single stayed for.

  If you aren’t there, his complete despair

  Would be painful to see

  So come to the ball, come to the ball

  Come to the ball, come to the ball

  With me.

  Higgins seduces Eliza with romantic images of handsome suitors, though tantalizingly the choruses end with the phrase “Come to the ball with me.” Did Lerner mean to convey a sense of the union between Eliza and Higgins by promoting the image of her accompanying him to the ball? There is no doubt that by removing the song, the ambiguity of the relationship between these two characters was more successfully balanced. The third verse is too flagrant a self-portrait of Higgins and his feelings for Eliza to be mistaken: it refers to a “man with a smile you could see for a mile,” clearly meant to be Higgins himself. Further images of “the pride in his eyes” and “his dimensions expanding,” and particularly the idea that Eliza’s triumph will make him the proudest man in the world, generate a romantic intensity between the two characters, which is alien to their behavior elsewhere in the musical.

  Apart from the issue of length and the problems with the depiction of romance, two other explanations for the cut are also possible. Perhaps Lerner felt there was an unintentional clash between Higgins’s promise that he would be proud of Eliza if she triumphed and the events of the opening scene of act 2, when he declares that it is his triumph, not hers. Or, similarly, perhaps he felt this sequence of events would make Higgins’s rejection of Eliza all the harsher and demonize him to a degree that made him too unsympathetic. Aside from this, it is also true that parts of the lyric are less effective than they could be. The stanza beginning “There even may be a dashing marquis…” becomes anemic toward the end, because the combination of the lines “He always prayed for” and “Single stayed for” is merely a repetition of the same (unimportant) word “for,” rather than a rhyme to match those in the other stanzas. Additionally, it blurs a clause which is written as normal (“He always prayed for”) with one whose words Lerner had to swap around for the sake of meter and poetry (a weak, feminine rhyme) rather than common sense (“Single stayed for” instead of “Stayed single for”). A subsequent image of a lord who is “frantically bored” and becomes “an Indian lancer” because of Eliza’s failure to attend is bizarre—why would this peculiar individual motivate her to come to the ball? Farther on, a line about ladies’ teeth “gnashing” is oxymoronic—a true lady would never do that—and the rhyming image of monocles “crashing” also fails to connect us with reality (how could a single lens make as loud a noise as a “crash”?). These sorts of small anomalies are probably one reason why the song failed to make an impact on the first night audience in New Haven.

  Yet the middle section of the song gives us important clues about the original structure of the show and casts one of its most famous numbers in an entirely new light. Bars 76–108 are musically similar to part of the central section of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” in which Higgins imagines how Eliza’s life could collapse without him (“I can see her now: Missus Freddy Eynsford-Hill, in a wretched little flat above a store” and so on; see ex. 4.9). The only difference is that “Come to the Ball” does not dwell on this material for the same length of time: it omits the minor-key passage of this part of “Accustomed to Her Face.” Had “Come to the Ball” not been cut from the show, the effect of this section of “Accustomed” would have been completely different. Instead of merely providing new, contrasting material to the lyrical feel of the main part of the song, the “I can see her now” section would have been a reprise of the “Come to the Ball” interlude but with a reversal of sentiment. In place of the flattering lines “I can see you now in a gown by Madame Worth [etc.]” in “Come to the Ball,” Higgins sings the insulting “I can see her now … Not a penny in the till [etc.].” This demonstrates that each of the show’s two acts were to reach a climax with a monologue
by Higgins, the first seductive and flattering and sung to Eliza, the second an expression of his mixed affection for and frustration with her, sung to himself. To read this section of “Accustomed” as a reprise of earlier material also changes its gesture: the images that Higgins evokes (e.g., “the bill collector beating on the door”) are obviously hyperbolic, but in the context of their relation to his previous “seduction” of Eliza they reveal a bitterness that implies a rejected lover more strongly than the song does without “Come to the Ball” in the show. Therefore, it has to be considered that by removing this romantically overt song, Lerner was making a resounding gesture about the nature of the Higgins-Eliza relationship, namely that it is not the straightforward romance that some writers assume.

  The music also contributes to the song’s overt romanticism: the use of a waltz signifies dancing couples, and by extension, romantic attachment. This matches the meaning of the song very well, but if a decision had been made to cut lyrics about Higgins’s attraction to Eliza, it can only have been intensified by their waltz accompaniment (see ex. 4.8). On a practical level, having a waltz at this point also anticipates “The Embassy Waltz” in the following scene. Obviously, Higgins is talking about the ball, and it is natural that the music that will be played there is the musical backbone to his song. But to have first one waltz then another is perhaps too much of the same thing. Furthermore, a comparison between the dance number and the song does “Come to the Ball” no favors. No doubt to accommodate Rex Harrison’s limited vocal abilities, the vocal line moves in a stepwise motion nearly all the way through, and the range is limited. In consequence, the melody is far from memorable and, in truth, sometimes monotonous. By contrast, “The Embassy Waltz” features accented leaps, both of which evoke an animated dance scene and a general smoothness of line, indicating couples skimming across the dance floor.

  Dress Ballet

  If “Come to the Ball” hints at a connection with “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” the “Dress Ballet” confirms it. Several musical sources for the ballet have survived; between them, they bring to life what was briefly the most complicated number in the show. The main source for all the manuscripts is a fourteen-page piano score written by Trude Rittmann, several photocopies of which are contained in the Warner-Chappell Collection but not the original. One copy is annotated “Freda” on the front page, indicating Freda Miller, the dance pianist; another is attached to a one-page conductor’s short score titled “Intro to Dress Ballet.” Another contains an insert in Rittmann’s hand titled “Dress Ballet (last pages redone)”; bars 209–12 have been crossed out, and the insert shows a later version of 246–59, but the revision of bars 209–45 seems not to have survived.26 This latter score is the closest to the final version of the ballet that exists in piano score. In addition, there is a one-page autograph score in Rittmann’s hand of the new nine-bar “Intro to Dress Ballet,” which is also represented by the autograph full score in Phil Lang’s hand. Robert Russell Bennett’s thirty-four-page full score for the ballet is also in the collection and shows the final version of the number.27

  The idea for the ballet was present right from Lerner and Loewe’s initial attempts to write the show. On May 10, 1952, Lerner wrote to Gabriel Pascal: “The end of the first act, of course, can be one of the great moments of any musical I can remember. It should be Liza’s preparation for the ball, her excitement, her desire to please the Prof., her dressing, her rehearsing, her manners, etc.”28 In Outlines 1 and 2 (see chap. 3), the ballet was the centerpiece of “scene 10”: “Montage of Liza’s lessons, this time all done balletically in pantomime.”29 Outline 3 describes the ballet (now “scene 9”) in similar terms: “We intend a short balletic pantomime of more lessons, all to take place in the study. There will be dancing teachers, those who teach her how to walk properly, hairdressers, couturieres, etc.”30 The number was also still in place in Outline 4: “Ballet: (or pantomime) The preparation of LIZA—LIZA, HIGGINS, DRESSMAKERS, DANCING TEACHERS, BEAUTY SPECIALISTS, ETC.”31

  Various documents in Hanya Holm’s papers in the New York Public Library reveal her rigorous preparation for this piece, which would have been her big showcase as the choreographer of My Fair Lady (as the dream ballets in Oklahoma! and Carousel had been for Agnes de Mille). One sheet of paper has a brief list of numbers in her handwriting, on which she describes Higgins as “directing the dancer inside her to dance in his tempo!” Another page refers to the ballet as a “Cartoon.” Of the many lists of potential characters for the ballet, the inventory of dancers, the parts they were to play in the ballet, and their proposed costumes, shown in table 4.1, seems the most likely final version.

  Eleven other documents in the same folder contain additional notes on the ballet. Perhaps the most important of these is a list of the show’s dance numbers in Holm’s handwriting. The ballet is referred to as: “Cartoon dance [The statue comes to life].” This may be the only direct allusion in all the sources for the show to the Greek Pygmalion myth. Another intriguing description has the ballet as a “nightmare”—a more grotesque interpretation than we might expect, but nevertheless one which dominates the mood of many of the choreographer’s other drafts. For instance, one set of notes includes a rather savage ending to the projected ballet: “At height of entertainment Liza breaks in[to] hysterical laughter, bringing Higgins onto balcony. He summons Pickering, who comes with Bullwhip + gun + revolver whilst wielding in air. Group vanishes every conceivable object, leaving Liza alone.”32 In addition to the hint of sadism in this account, which also contains images such as “Valse her to death” and “Liza falls exhausted” in earlier paragraphs, it is fascinating that Pickering is portrayed as such an active participant in the nastier aspect of the mime, since he is normally more sympathetic toward Eliza than Higgins is. This uncharacteristic behavior also seems briefly to have been the case in the following set of notes, where Pickering’s name has been crossed out and Higgins instead has been associated with the image of the “Torturer”:

  Table 4.1. Inventory of Characters and Costumes in the Dress Ballet

  The cartoon starts from reality, goes through time elapse, increases in nervous tension, all efforts are left too late, but during process of working on her, she becomes more and more twisted and when she arrives at the Ball she is in a dream. She walks like a dreamwalker, being transported into another world.

  This document is also striking for its portrayal of Eliza’s emotional journey through the number on the left against the list of lessons on the right; the passage of time is vivid, and on the back of the paper Holm noted: “‘Workmen’ would change very simple accessories at every re-appearance to signify elapse of time.” Evidently she wanted to create a dark vision in which Eliza became so mentally and physically tortured that she lost track of the boundary between dream and reality.

  The following description is Holm’s most detailed and final document of the choreography of the ballet:

  Higgins finishes singing [“Come to the Ball”]. Lights come up full. He starts metronome and with sadistic look to Liza goes upstairs in rhythm to the tick of instrument. Entrance of first worker can blend with his exit or he can be instrumental with beginning.

  [Part 1] Workers in 1 part: Trainer, dance master, cobbler, couturier.

  Liza: Depressed, she resents all efforts done to her. Her composure falls to pieces and she has a complete fall back in her old self. She is destructive, uncooperative. Fish arrive, cockney. Speak cockney.

  All efforts of “workmen” with no—if not contrary result. Trainer + the dancing master work complementary. Work themselves in a sweat over her with disheartening result. Couturier presents material to inspecting eyes. Cobbler finds unwilling feet. Utter resentment, if not illwill to accept.

  She signifies defeat + depression.

  After this first amount of “workmen,” they retire in despair, only to return with doppeled effort.

  Part 2. Liza. Mechanical acceptance. Pup[p]et-like obedience with neither un
derstanding nor interest. Showing signs of being worked on. Trainer brings helper, couturier brings helper so does dance master + cobbler adding Milliner + make up.

  Summing up: no result but more commotion + less resistance.

  Part 3. “Workmen” come in greater quantities. More concerted efforts fast + furious throwing her in state of confusion + bewilderment.

  Extreme + supreme effort of dancing master to perfect her in curtsey + walk + Valse. Tempo increases to whirling speed of feverish racing against time. Milliner brings head dummy, with hat on which was not finished before.

  Cobbler bring finished shoes.

  Couturier brings fancy negligee.

  Trainer + dance master sweat over their efforts + with everybody helping in their own way, only to leave her limp and with a through the will feeling, an end of all resistance (kneaded like a dough to be baked).