My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Getting the show on was no easy task. His contemporaries thought he was mad. How to find one hundred and fifteen black performers (his original cast) who were well-enough trained to sing Bizet’s score? Because that, with a few minor alterations and cuts, was what he had used, transposing nothing and leaving all the musical excitement and challenge untampered with. Fortunately, he was introduced to the flamboyant and audacious impresario Billy Rose, who, on hearing of the idea, eagerly put his weight behind the project, which led his fellow producers to think that he had gone mad, too. A production of all the talents was immediately assembled: Howard Bay and Raoul Pène Du Bois to do sets and costumes, Eugene Loring to choreograph, Charles Friedman (of the left-wing Labor Project) to direct the book, Robert Shaw, then and now the greatest of American chorus masters, to work with the ensemble, and Joseph Littauer to conduct; the whole to be supervised by Hassard Short, English-born wizard of lighting and overall conception.

  There was only one small snag: they couldn’t find a cast. After three months of extensive auditions, the team had not found a single performer adequate to the show’s musical demands. On the point of abandoning the project, they had the extraordinary good fortune to run into the legendary A&R man, John Hammond. Once he had ascertained that Hammerstein’s version was a radical departure from the eyeball-rolling, happy-darkie nonsense that Broadway was pleased to purvey, Hammond put his huge knowledge of black talent at the team’s disposal. Bit by bit, they found their cast: Luther Reed, a riveter and dockworker as Joe, Glenn Bryant, a New York cop who had to be relieved from his beat by central government intervention, as Husky Miller, and, finally, Muriel Smith, a twenty-year-old first-year music student at the Curtis Institute, the first ever black student to enrol there, as Carmen; she was working nights as a chemist to pay her way through college.

  Billy Rose’s blind faith was rewarded with staggering reviews, from both music and drama critics. Among the most perceptive was that of the New York Herald Tribune’s music critic, the composer Virgil Thomson, who hailed the show both as a reproach to prevailing standards at the Metropolitan Opera House and as a return to Bizet’s original conception before it was transmogrified, on his deathbed, and without his consent, into a Grand Opera. Thomson’s phrase to describe both Carmen and Carmen Jones – ‘realistic proletarian melodrama’ – is brilliantly precise. This is what gives both the opera and the ‘musical play’ (his own phrase) that Hammerstein adapted from it its feeling of coming from today’s headlines.

  We started work on Carmen Jones knowing that if we could capture a half of the excitement generated by the original show, we would set the town alight. In addition, there was the chance of working with an all-black cast – an ambition I’d long had, hoping to do a black version of The Importance of Being Earnest, but very happy with the hand that fate, Carmen-like, had dealt me. My starting point, like Hammerstein’s, was the music. I knew and admired, from his recordings with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the Seventies, the work of the black American conductor Henry Lewis. Never having met him, I had a powerful instinct that he was the man we needed; an instinct that proved right in various unexpected ways. I had forgotten that he had been married to Marilyn Horne, the voice of Dorothy Dandridge in Preminger’s film, and thus knew the show and its special demands intimately; moreover he had conducted five different productions of Carmen, including most performances of the legendary one at the Met starring Horne, initially conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

  At Sardi’s one summer evening we decided the basic principles that have informed all our work on the show: it would be essentially realistic (psychologically and socially detailed, a story of real people in a real world), every word of Hammerstein’s astonishing lyrics would be heard, and clearly heard, the orchestral sound would not mimic a symphony orchestra’s, nor yet be a synthetic concoction, but would reproduce the sound of a Forties band. Dave Cullen, master-orchestrator of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows, would arrange the score. In fact, Hammerstein’s deliberate setting of the piece in the year of its composition, 1943, in wartime America, would be respected; Bruno Santini’s designs would be completely in period. So far so good. But then we ran up against Billy Rose and Oscar Hammerstein’s problem: where were we to find a cast?

  The answer was simple: in America, for the most part. The original cast of the Old Vic production was mostly imported from the States; there simply were not enough British black performers with the vocal skills to fill the roles. The show opened with great success; as the show ran on we needed to recast. To our delighted amazement we discovered that more and more British black artists, fired by the example of the American artists in the show, had worked on their own on their voices, and were coming to us with their ranges and their stamina transformed out of recognition. Thus the present production – tighter, sharper, more direct than before – fields a cast which is one hundred per cent British. To be pleased about this is not chauvinistic: it is entirely in the spirit of Oscar Hammerstein’s desire to celebrate ‘the huge wealth of black talent’ in his country. We had exactly the same ambition when we started out; that, and to tell the terrible story he had so brilliantly reclaimed from the stuffy confines of the opera house, of the maddeningly free spirit whose lover, unable to possess her, turns into her killer. Fatal Attraction indeed.

  Two singers who played Joe were particularly remarkable: Gary Wilmot, hitherto known for light comedy and a long run in Me and My Girl, and Anthony Garfield Henry, originally a dancer, who had started to do a little bit of singing in Miss Saigon. At his audition he sang ‘Dis Flower’, and he was frankly not up to it, so we said what we always said: ‘Go away and work on it and come back and see us.’ And he did, about a year later. He started singing, very quietly, and we started to wonder how soon we could stop him without bruising his dignity too much, when he slowly started to expand his dynamic range, till he was singing at triple forte, perfectly under control, perfectly in pitch, with absolute rhythmic control. He was a fully fledged singer, who when he came to do the show – and of course we cast him immediately – brought astounding power to the end of the third act and the final duet. A year or so later, when I was directing Puccini’s Il Trittico at Broomhill Opera, I asked him to sing Luigi in Il Tabarro, a famous and very challenging Domingo role, and he was again magnificent; a year later he sang Don José for Opera North.

  The day after the reviews for Carmen Jones came out, I was asked to direct My Fair Lady, which, of course, I did, with Edward Fox as Higgins, Helen Hobson as Eliza and Bryan Pringle as Doolittle. The choreographer was Quinny Sacks, the set designer David Fielding, the costume designer Jasper Conran, and the hats – those all-important hats – by Philip Treacy. It was a production of all the talents. Everyone did superb work – and it didn’t work. This was due to a vast complex of reasons, but in the end I must carry the can, as the director always must. I wrote a perhaps overexuberant piece for the programme, some weeks before we had actually opened.

  In 1959, mother and I were living in the tiny town of Fort Jameson in the very large country of Northern Rhodesia in the middle of the vast expanses of Africa. We shared a sprawling house with another fatherless family, and among our proudest possessions was a gramophone player, in a fine-looking walnut cabinet; you had to wind it up when the battery ran down, and it was the very latest thing. We had just one LP: the Drury Lane recording of the original production of My Fair Lady, with a famously witty sleeve adorned with a cartoon in which a snowy-bearded George Bernard Shaw is shown manipulating Professor Higgins, who is himself manipulating Eliza Doolittle. We played it over and over, not just because it was all the rage, and because it was tuneful and witty, but because it was so perfectly and completely British. For a little boy from Streatham who felt himself to be alarmingly adrift in an incomprehensibly strange and different land, it was immeasurably comforting to listen to ‘Wouldn’t It Be Luverly’ and ‘Why Can’t the English?’

  I don’t believe I realised for many years that it was in fact a
Broadway show, directed by an American, that its lyrics were by another American, its score was by an Austrian, and that it would never have happened at all had it not been for a Hungarian. The very fact that it existed as a musical was a minor miracle, because Shaw loathed the musical theatre, and publicly denounced the only attempt to convert one of his plays into a show – The Chocolate Soldier, an operetta by Oscar Straus based, very loosely indeed, on Arms and the Man. A rather better composer than Straus, Franz Léhar, attempted to persuade the old man to let him adapt Pygmalion, but was sent off with a flea in his ear: ‘I absolutely forbid such an outrage… Pygmalion is good enough with its own verbal music.’ As if to prove his point, composers found it very difficult to adapt: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein attempted to wrestle it into musical form, but gave up. In any case, as long as Shaw was alive (he died in 1950) there was no possibility of getting the rights; after he died, the Shaw estate faithfully maintained his position.

  There was, however, a loophole, which is where the Hungarian comes in, in the fabulously picaresque person of the producer – director – entrepreneur, Gabriel Pascal. This was the man who had succeeded where all the moguls of Hollywood had failed: he had persuaded Shaw to allow his plays to be filmed. Hollywood had offered millions (in the 1920s) for the rights, but Shaw was convinced that his work would be at the very least diluted and at worst destroyed in the Dream Factory. It is all the more extraordinary, then, that Pascal, a caricature of the Eastern European con man, incomprehensibly mangling the English language, patently mendacious and profoundly untrustworthy in all matters pecuniary, should have magicked the rights out of the canny if by now elderly Irishman. Shaw adored him, above all, it seems, because he made him laugh. ‘I have had to forbid Pascal to kiss me,’ he said, ‘as he did at first to the scandal of the village.’ Pascal himself directed Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion, confining himself to merely producing Pygmalion. For this, he commissioned Shaw to write a screenplay, but, taking advantage of the octogenarian dramatist’s absence from the film set, Pascal and his collaborators, the director Anthony Asquith, and the star and co-director Leslie Howard, dropped several of the scenes he wrote, and (with the aid of three other writers) invented a couple of new ones. Some of these substantially diverged from the play and the author’s passionately expressed view of the characters and their motives; most heretically, they had Eliza come back to Higgins at the end.

  Why Pascal is relevant to the story of My Fair Lady is that the splendid old rogue had, by means of one of his familiar contractual conjuring tricks, managed to prestidigitate away from the aged Shaw not merely the film rights to these plays, but the rights to any further adaptation, on stage or screen. Quite out of the blue, in 1952, he approached Alan Jay Lerner, who had just had a modest success with Paint Your Wagon, to ask him and Frederick Loewe, his composing partner, to write a musical version of the screenplay. Nothing came of it at the time, but two years later, Pascal having in the interim died, they secured the rights from his estate and plunged in. Using the screenplay as their dramatic template, they were relieved of the impossible challenge of setting closely argued Shavian dialogue to music. It also gave them the chance of creating vivid and colourful numbers, not strictly integral to the play’s action. With three exceptions – the Doolittle scenes (one in Tottenham Court Road, the other in Covent Garden), and the Ascot Gavotte, a re-siting of the tea-party scene in Pygmalion – all the ‘new’ scenes come from the film. These include some of the most famous scenes in the show: the ‘Rain in Spain’ scene (the phrases ‘the rain in Spain’ and ‘in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen’ are lifted directly from the screenplay); Freddy Eynsford-Hill’s vigil outside 27a Wimpole Street; the Embassy Ball, in which the oleaginous Karpathy tries unsuccessfully to unmask Eliza; and, finally, most significantly, the last scene of all, in which Eliza returns to Higgins, who is discovered listening to the first recordings he made of her voice.

  Lerner and Loewe were joined by a team of incomparable collaborators of innovative brilliance: Oliver Smith, designer of On the Town, Brigadoon, Oklahoma!; Hanya Holm, choreographer of ballets, initially for her own avant-garde troupe, then for Kiss Me Kate and The Golden Apple; Cecil Beaton, famous for his costumes for Lady Windermere’s Fan, The School for Scandal and The Chalk Garden, not to mention his standing as one of the world’s great photographers; Abe Feder, the greatest lighting designer the American theatre has ever produced, who lit not merely Orson Welles’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar, but also the Empire State Building. Before any of these, however, the producer Herman Levin had engaged as director the universally admired and loved Moss Hart, the writer and director who, in collaboration with George Kaufman and on his own, had been responsible for an unparalleled string of Broadway hits. This was the key appointment.

  Hart’s most pressing task was casting the – as yet unfinished – show. Henry Higgins was, of course, the big question. Noël Coward was asked; then Michael Redgrave. Both, for different reasons, turned the show down. Next on the list was Rex Harrison. After a great deal of persuasion, he accepted the part, even though, as he said with characteristic tact, only two out of the five songs were any good. The authors immediately began to frame the part according to his capacities and personality. Fritz Loewe reimagined his songs as Sprechgesang (speech-song), an idiom familiar to him from the musical avant-garde of his youth in Berlin, while Lerner imported Harrison’s explosiveness and his incomprehension of the female sex (so many of whom he had married) into the lyrics. All other important roles were filled with veteran British performers: Stanley Holloway, a great variety star of the Thirties, was Doolittle, Robert Coote, a distinguished character man, Colonel Pickering, and Higgins’s mother was played by Cathleen Nesbitt, who seemed to embody the vanished Edwardian age of which her first boyfriend, Rupert Brooke, had been the poet laureate. The cast was so overwhelmingly British that a tea break, hitherto unheard of in Broadway rehearsals, had to be introduced.

  Only the all-important casting of Eliza remained. It was the toughest role yet written for a woman in the musical theatre, in which, hitherto, the greatest crisis a heroine had had to face was a dating problem, or the enumeration of the children of the King of Siam. Mary Martin turned them down – ‘How could it have happened,’ she asked her husband after hearing the songs for the first time, ‘how could it have happened? Those dear boys have lost their talent’ – whereupon they offered it to Julie Andrews, from Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, twenty years old, and at that moment starring on Broadway in the latest import from London, Sandy Wilson’s deliciously silly show The Boy Friend. They took a tremendous gamble on her lack of acting experience; and indeed, during rehearsals, the authors – and, without any attempt at concealment, her co-star – began increasingly to doubt their wisdom. Moss Hart, a wise and cunning old hand, kept his faith in her, suspending rehearsals for two days to teach her the role, gesture by gesture, inflection by inflection, line by line – a real-life Higgins to her real-life Eliza.

  Inspiration ran very high. Beaton had sworn never to do another stage show, but was enchanted by the possibility of putting the elegant world of his childhood on stage. Oliver Smith, veteran of countless radical and innovative ballet designs, and later of highly successful musicals, used the inevitable succession of back and front cloths (the show has seventeen changes of scene) to evoke London interiors and exteriors in cleverly angled and stylised rooms and boldly painted vistas: the scene in the Covent Garden Market is an almost Expressionist vision of great arching roofs jostling each other at crazy tangents. Here was no tired realism, no chocolate-box charm. Hanya Holm likewise eschewed swooning waltzes and Me and My Girl knees-ups, finding instead a physical language of wit and droll allusion. The form of the piece, as devised by Alan Lerner (much aided by Moss Hart, who provided a similar service for him to the one he performed for Julie Andrews: a weekend-long seminar on structure and storytelling), was, with its quick succession of scenes, r
evue-like. Each scene required a brilliant visual image, a physical language which revealed the class and world of the characters, and acting which communicated vividly and amusingly.

  We have one indispensable piece of evidence from that first production: the original cast recording, made on the Sunday after the Thursday opening. From the first note of the overture – dynamically propelled along by Franz Allers, another of the collaborators, the outstanding Broadway conductor of his day, a sophisticated musician who came from the world of classical music – the feeling is vital, brilliant, bold, theatrical. Harrison, still excited and challenged by the new medium, performs on a knife-edge, half speaking, half singing, his songs, almost seeming to improvise them. Andrews is suffused with rapture. Stanley Holloway brings a wholly authentic and grounded note of music hall to the proceedings, rough, real and earthy. Allers drives the score along at a delirious pace. The rhythms are pungent, the wit is always unexpected and the romance breathtaking, whether in Freddy Eynsford-Hill’s effusions or Eliza’s self-discoveries. Higgins’s capitulation to feeling is tentative, unwilling and, ultimately, overwhelming.

  In the 1958 recording from the London production at Drury Lane, the one I wore out all those years ago in our rondavel in Fort Jameson, everything has become a hundred times more accomplished; they had all been playing the piece for two years. Skill is supreme; and with it greater sophistication of feeling. Harrison’s ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ is a masterpiece of dramatic emotionalism. Something is missing, a certain edge; but in the face of so much brilliance, its loss is insignificant. In the film (1965), the tendency to smooth out, to varnish over, has become rampant. Oliver Smith, Hanya Holm, Moss Hart (who died in 1960, replaced for the film by George Cukor), Julie Andrews, have all disappeared. Cecil Beaton, now responsible for both sets and costumes of paralysing prettiness, Rex Harrison, a very different, mellower, softer Rex Harrison from the Rex Harrison of eight years before, Audrey Hepburn, ravishingly unconvincing either as flower-girl or as self-confident, independent and suddenly grown-up woman, and André Previn (seemingly determined to out-Mantovani Mantovani with his hundred-piece orchestra), rule the roost. The music has become slower and fatter; any attempt at stylisation in the settings has disappeared, without the introduction of any compensating realism; the choreography, by Hermes Pan, is entirely conventional. Paradoxically, the feeling of the film is theatrical: it seems to take place in Never-Never Land. The harsh elements of the story and the audacious wit of the stage show have become ironed out – the Cinderella dimension has become all, with the outcome never seriously in doubt.