chapter twelve

MY FAIR LADY
From Pygmalion to Cinderella

M
y Fair Lady was without doubt the most popularly successful musi-
cal of its era. Before the close of its spectacular run of 2,717 perfor-
mances from 1956 to 1962 it had comfortably surpassed Oklahoma!’s
previous record of 2,248.1 And unlike the ephemeral success of the wartime
Broadway heroines depicted in Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus, libret-
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tist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner’s and composer Frederick “Fritz” Loewe’s fair
lady went on to age phenomenally well. Most remarkably, over eighteen mil-
lion cast albums were sold and profits from the staged performances, albums,
and 1964 film came to the then-astronomical figure of $800 million. Critically
successful revivals followed in 1975 and 1981, the latter with Rex Harrison
(Henry Higgins) and Cathleen Nesbitt (Mrs. Higgins) reclaiming their orig-
inal Broadway roles. In 1993 the work returned once again, this time with
television miniseries superstar Richard Chamberlain as Higgins, newcomer
Melissa Errico as Eliza, and Julian Holloway playing Alfred P. Doolittle, the
role his father, Stanley, created on Broadway on March 15, 1956.
As with most of the musicals under scrutiny in the present survey, the
popular and financial success of My Fair Lady was and continues to be
matched by critical acclaim. Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune told his read-
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ers: “Don’t bother to finish reading this review now. You’d better sit down
and send for those tickets to My Fair Lady.”2 William Hawkins of the World-
Telegram & Sun wrote that the show “prances into that rare class of great
musicals” and that “quite simply, it has everything,” providing “a legendary

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 My Fair Lady

evening” with songs that “are likely to be unforgettable.”3 In what may be

the highest tribute paid to the show, Harrison reported that “Cole Porter
reserved himself a seat once a week for the entire run.”4
Opening night critics immediately recognized that My Fair Lady fully
measured up to the Rodgers and Hammerstein model of an integrated
musical. As Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror wrote: “The Lerner-Loewe
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5PQ S I U

My Fair Lady. George Bernard Shaw and his puppets, Rex Harrison and Julie
Andrews (1956). © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with
Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD.,
NEW YORK. WWW. ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

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 Enchanted Evenings

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 impor-
tant and integrated element in about as perfect an entertainment as the most
fastidious playgoer could demand. . . . A new landmark in the genre fathered
by Rodgers and Hammerstein. A terrific show!”5
Many early critics noted the skill and appropriateness of the adaptation
from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912). For Daily News reviewer John
Chapman, Lerner and Loewe “have written much the way Shaw must have
done had he been a musician instead of a music critic.”6 Hawkins wrote
that “the famed Pygmalion has been used with such artfulness and taste,
such vigorous reverence, that it springs freshly to life all over again.”7 And
even though Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times added the somewhat
condescending “basic observation” that “Shaw’s crackling mind is still the
genius of My Fair Lady,” he concluded his rave of this “wonderful show” by
endorsing the work on its own merits: “To Shaw’s agile intelligence it adds
the warmth, loveliness, and excitement of a memorable theatre frolic.”8
Lerner (1918–1986) and Loewe (1901–1988) met fortuitously at New
York’s Lambs Club in 1942. Before he began to match wits with Loewe,
Lerner’s marginal writing experience had consisted of lyrics to two Hasty
Pudding musicals at Harvard and a few radio scripts. Shortly after their
meeting Loewe asked Lerner to help revise Great Lady, a musical that had
previously met its rapid Broadway demise in 1938. The team inauspiciously
inaugurated their Broadway collaboration with two now-forgotten flops,
What’s Up? (1943) and The Day before Spring (1945).
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Documentation for the years before Loewe arrived in the United States in
1924 is sporadic and unreliable, and most of the frequently circulated “facts”
about the European years—for example, that Loewe studied with Weill’s
teacher, Ferruccio Busoni—were circulated by Loewe himself and cannot
be independently confirmed. Sources even disagree about the year and city
of his birth, and the most reliable fact about his early years is that his father
was the famous singer Edmund Loewe, who debuted as Prince Danilo in
the Berlin production of Lehár’s The Merry Widow and performed the lead in
Oscar Straus’s first and only Shaw adaptation, The Chocolate Soldier.9
As Loewe would have us believe, young Fritz was a child prodigy who
began to compose at the age of seven and who at age thirteen became the
youngest pianist to have appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic. None of
this can be verified. Lerner and Loewe biographer Gene Lees also questions
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Loewe’s frequently reported claim to have written a song, “Katrina,” that

managed to sell two million copies.10 Loewe’s early years in America remain
similarly obscure. After a decade of often extremely odd jobs, including
professional boxing, gold prospecting, delivering mail on horseback, and

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 My Fair Lady

cow punching, Loewe broke into show business when one of his songs was
interpolated in the nonmusical Petticoat Fever by operetta star Dennis King.
Another Loewe song was interpolated in The Illustrators Show (1936).11 The
Great Lady fiasco (twenty performances) occurred two years later.
After their early Broadway failures, Lerner and Loewe produced their
first successful Rodgers and Hammerstein–type musical on their third
Broadway try, Brigadoon (1947), a romantic tale of a Scottish village that
awakens from a deep sleep once every hundred years. By the end of the
musical, the town offers a permanent home to a formerly jaded American
who discovers the meaning of life and love (and some effective ersatz-
Scottish music) within its timeless borders. The following year Lerner
wrote the book and lyrics for the first of many musicals without Loewe,
the modestly successful and rarely revived avant-garde “concept musical”
Love Life (with music by Weill). Lerner and Loewe’s next collaboration, the
occasionally revived Paint Your Wagon (1951) was less than a hit on its first
run. Also in 1951 Lerner without Loewe wrote the Academy Award–win-
ning screenplay for An American in Paris, which featured the music and
lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin. By 1952 Lerner, reunited with Loewe,
was ready to tackle Shaw.

My Fair Lady and Pygmalion

The Genesis
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It may seem inevitable that someone would have set Pygmalion, especially
when considering the apparent ease with which Lerner and Loewe adapted
Shaw’s famous play for the musical stage. In fact, much conspired against
any musical setting of a Shaw play for the last forty years of the transplanted
Irishman’s long and productive life. The main obstacle until Shaw’s death in
1950 was the playwright himself, who, after enduring what he considered
to be a travesty of Arms and the Man in Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier (1910),
wrote to Theatre Guild producer Theresa Helburn in 1939 that “nothing will
ever induce me to allow any other play of mine to be degraded into an oper-
etta or set to any music except its own.”12 As early as 1921, seven years after
the English premiere of his play, Shaw aggressively thwarted an attempt by
Lehár to secure the rights to Pygmalion: “a Pygmalion operetta is quite out of
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the question.”13 As late as 1948 Shaw was rejecting offers to musicalize Pyg-
malion, and in response to a request from Gertrude Lawrence (the original
heroine of Lady in the Dark) he offered his last word on the subject: “My deci-
sion as to Pygmalion is final: let me hear no more about it. This is final.”14

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 Enchanted Evenings

Much of our information on the genesis of My Fair Lady comes from Ler-
ner’s engagingly written autobiography, The Street Where I Live (1978), more
than one hundred pages of which are devoted to the compositional genesis,
casting, and production history of their Shaw adaptation.15 Additionally,
Loewe’s holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts in the Music Division of
the Library of Congress offer a fascinating glimpse into some later details of
the compositional process of the songs.
From Lerner we learn that after two or three weeks of intensive discussion
and planning in 1952 the team’s first tussle with the musicalization of Shaw’s
play had produced only discouragement. Part of the problem was that the
reverence Lerner and Loewe held for Shaw’s play precluded a drastic over-
haul. Equally problematic, their respect for the Rodgers and Hammerstein
model initially prompted Lerner and Loewe to find an appropriate place for
a choral ensemble as well as a secondary love story. While a chorus could
be contrived with relative ease, it was more difficult to get around the sec-
ond problem: Shaw’s play “had one story and one story only,” and the cen-
tral plot of Pygmalion, “although Shaw called it a romance, is a non-love
story.”16 In a chance meeting with Hammerstein, the great librettist-lyricist
told Lerner, “It can’t be done. . . . Dick [Rodgers] and I worked on it for over
a year and gave it up.”17
Lerner and Loewe returned to their adaptation of Shaw two years later
optimistic that a Shavian musical would be possible. As Lerner explains:

By 1954 it no longer seemed essential that a musical have a sub-

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plot, nor that there be an ever-present ensemble filling the air with
high C’s and flying limbs. In other words, some of the obstacles
that had stood in the way of converting Pygmalion into a musi-
cal had simply been removed by a changing style. . . . As Fritz and
I talked and talked, we gradually began to realize that the way to
convert Pygmalion to a musical did not require the addition of any
new characters. . . . We could do Pygmalion simply by doing Pygmal-
ion following the screenplay [of the 1938 film as altered by director
Gabriel Pascal] more than the [stage] play and adding the action
that took place between the acts of the play.18

Instead of placing Higgins as a professor of phonetics in a university set-

ting in order to generate the need for a chorus of students, Professor Higgins
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used his home as his laboratory and a chorus composed of his servants now
sufficed. Since the move from a tea party at the home of Higgins’s mother
to the Ascot races provided the opportunity for a second chorus, it seemed
unnecessary to insert a third chorus at the Embassy Ball. Although they did

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 My Fair Lady

not invent any characters, Lerner and Loewe did provide a variation of a
Rodgers and Hammerstein–type subplot by expanding the role of Alfred
P. Doolittle, Eliza’s father.19 Despite these changes and other omissions and
insertions that alter the tone and meaning of Shaw’s play, Lerner’s libretto
follows much of the Pygmalion text with remarkable tenacity. In contrast to
any of the adaptations considered here, Lerner and Loewe’s libretto leaves
long stretches of dialogue virtually unchanged.
By November 1954 Lerner and Loewe had completed five songs for
their new musical. Two of these, “The Ascot Gavotte” and “Just You Wait,”
would eventually appear in the show. Another song intended for Eliza, “Say
a Prayer for Me Tonight,” would be partially salvaged in the Embassy Ball
music and recycled in the film Gigi (1958).20 Also completed by November
1954 were two songs intended for Higgins, “Please Don’t Marry Me,” the
“first attempt to dramatize Higgins’s misogyny,” and “Lady Liza,” the first
of several attempts to find a song in which Higgins would encourage a
demoralized Eliza to attend the Embassy Ball.21 Rex Harrison, the Higgins
of choice from the outset, vigorously rejected both of these songs, and they
quickly vanished. The casting of Harrison, the actor most often credited
with introducing a new kind of talk-sing, was of course a crucial decision
that affected the musical characteristics of future Higgins songs.22 A second
try at “Please Don’t Marry Me” followed in 1955 and resulted in the now
familiar “I’m an Ordinary Man.” “Come to the Ball” replaced “Lady Liza”
and stayed in the show until opening night. Lerner summarizes the compo-
sitional progress of their developing show: “By mid-February [1955] we left
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London with the Shaw rights in one hand, commitments from Rex Harrison,
Stanley Holloway, and Cecil Beaton [costumes] in the other, two less songs
than we had arrived with [“Please Don’t Marry Me” and “Lady Liza”] and
a year’s work ahead of us.”23
Earlier Lerner reported that a winter’s journey around the frigid Cov-
ent Garden had yielded the title and melody of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.”
The genesis of Eliza’s first song demonstrates the team’s usual pattern: title,
tune, and, after excruciating procrastination and writer’s block, a lyric.24 The
lyricist details the agony of creation for “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” a pro-
cess that took Loewe “one afternoon” and Lerner weeks of delay and psy-
chological trauma before he could even produce a word. Six weeks “after a
successful tour around the neighborhood with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ ”
they completed Higgins’s opening pair of songs, “Why Can’t the English?”
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and “I’m an Ordinary Man.”25 These are the last songs that Lerner mentions
before rehearsals began in January 1956.
Lerner’s chronology accounts for all but four My Fair Lady songs: “With
a Little Bit of Luck,” “The Servants’ Chorus,” “Promenade,” and “Without

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 Enchanted Evenings

You.” All Lerner has to say about “With a Little Bit of Luck” is that it was
written for Holloway sometime before rehearsals.26 But although Lerner’s
autobiography provides no additional chronological information about the
remaining three songs, we are not reduced to idle speculation concerning
two of these. On musical evidence it is apparent that the “Introduction to
Promenade” was adapted from “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” one of the
earliest songs drafted for the show.27 It will also be observed shortly that the
principal melody of “Without You” is partially derived from Higgins’s “I’m
an Ordinary Man,” completed nearly a year before rehearsals.28 Loewe’s
holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts of My Fair Lady songs verify
Lerner’s remark that this last-mentioned song underwent “one or two false
starts.”29 Harrison described one of these as “inferior Noël Coward.”30 (In
other differences with the published vocal score, the holograph of “You Did
It” contains a shortened introduction and a considerable amount of addi-
tional but mostly repetitive material.)31
Of great importance for the peformance style of Higgins’s role was the
decision to allow the professor to talk his way into a song or a new phrase
of a song. In “I’m an Ordinary Man,” “A Hymn to Him,” and “I’ve Grown
Accustomed to Her Face,” audiences have long been accustomed to hear
Higgins speak lines that are underscored by orchestral melody; the pitches
are usually indicated in the vocal part by X’s, recalling the notation of
Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire. The first of many examples of
this occurs at the beginning of “I’m an Ordinary Man.” This move from song
to speech probably occurred during the course of rehearsals. In any event,
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the holograph scores almost invariably indicate that these passages were
originally meant to be sung.32

A New Happy Ending

In their most significant departure from their source Lerner and Loewe
altered Shaw’s ending to allow a romantic resolution between Higgins and
Eliza Doolittle. Shaw strenuously argued against this Cinderella interpreta-
tion, but he would live to regret that his original concluding lines in 1912
allow the possibility that Eliza, who has metamorphosed into “a tower of
strength, a consort battleship,” will return to live with Higgins and Picker-
ing as an independent woman, one of “three old bachelors together instead
of only two men and a silly girl.”33 While in his original text Shaw expresses
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Higgins’s confidence that Eliza will return with the requested shopping list,
for the next forty years the playwright would quixotically try to establish his
unwavering intention that Higgins and Eliza would never marry.34 Here are
the final lines of Shaw’s play:

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 My Fair Lady

mrs. higgins: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. But never
mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and glove.
higgins: (sunnily) Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy ’em all right enough.
Goodbye.
(They kiss. mrs. higgins runs out. higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in
his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.)

Despite Shaw’s unequivocal interpretation—and long before Pascal’s

Pygmalion film in 1938 or the My Fair Lady musical in 1956—the original
Higgins, Beerbohm Tree, had already taken liberties that would distort the
play beyond Shaw’s tolerance. In reporting on the 1914 London premiere to
his wife Charlotte, Shaw wrote: “For the last two acts I writhed in hell. . . . The
last thing I saw as I left the house was Higgins shoving his mother rudely
out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy ham for his lonely
home like a bereaved Romeo.”35 Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw cre-
ated the role of Eliza, urged the playwright to attend another performance
“soon—or you’ll not recognize your play.”36
When he summoned enough courage to attend the hundredth perfor-
mance, Shaw was appalled to discover that “in the brief interval between
the end of the play and fall of the curtain, the amorous Higgins threw flow-
ers at Eliza (and with them Shaw’s instructions far out of sight).”37 To make
explicit what he had perhaps naively assumed would be understood, Shaw
published a sequel to Pygmalion in 1916, in which he explained in detail
why Eliza and Higgins could not and should not be considered as potential
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romantic partners.
Considering his strong ideas on the subject, it is surprising that Shaw
permitted Pascal to further alter the ending (and many other parts) of
Shaw’s original screenplay for the 1938 Pygmalion film in order to create
the impression that Higgins and Eliza would in fact unite. Perhaps Shaw
was unaware that Pascal had actually filmed two other endings, including
Shaw’s. In 1941, Penguin Books published a version of Shaw’s screenplay,
which included reworked versions of five film scenes that were not part of
the original play:

1. Eliza getting in a taxi and returning to her lodgings at the end

of act I;
2. Higgins’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, giving Eliza a bath in the
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middle of act II;

3. Eliza’s lessons with Higgins at the end of act II;
4. The Embassy Ball at the end of act III (this scene is based on
the Embassy Ball in the film—another Cinderella image—that

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 Enchanted Evenings

replaced the ambassador’s garden party, dinner, and opera

that took place offstage in the play);
5. Eliza’s meeting with Freddy when she leaves Higgins’s
residence at the end of act IV.

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,
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looking back at him. Higgins just begins to smile; then he recol-

lects 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), how-
ever, Shaw managed to have the last word. It appeared in a letter of correc-
tions from August 19, 1939:

mrs. higgins: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be
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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.)

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 My Fair Lady

After submitting this final ending, Shaw parenthetically inserted the fol-
lowing 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 complex-
ion . . . 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 audi-
ences of both film and musical do not actually see Eliza fetch Higgins’s slip-
pers, 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 intro-
duced 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 intro-
duced in the film would be developed still further, Alfred P. Doolittle would
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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 philo-
sophical 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
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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.

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 Enchanted Evenings

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 suffer-
ing: “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
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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 inde-
pendence 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 psychologi-
cal upper hand as well. Clearly, Lerner and Loewe romanticized, and there-
fore 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 play-
wright 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 compo-
sure (“he lays hands on her”). Lerner and Loewe accomplish this volte-face by
taking advantage of music’s power to reveal psychological change. Simply
5PQ S I U

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

270
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 My Fair Lady

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.
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of “taming” Kate in Kiss Me, Kate), sputters her ineffectual dreams of ven-
geance 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 Picker-
ing 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).
5PQ S I U

Example 12.1. “Just You Wait” and selected transformations

(a) “Just You Wait”
(b) “Without You”
(c) “I’m an Ordinary Man”
(d) “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”

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 Enchanted Evenings
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Example 12.1. Continued

The opening phrase of the chorus in “Without You,” Eliza’s ode to inde-
pendence, 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, audi-
ences 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
5PQ S I U

“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

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 My Fair Lady

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 musi-
cal 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 Exam-
ple 12.2b, no longer does Higgins move up an ascending scale to reach his des-
tination 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
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Higgins and Eliza in the second act of My Fair Lady.49

5PQ S I U

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”

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 Enchanted Evenings

Although they lack the immediate recognizability of these melodic exam-

ples, the most frequent musical unities are rhythmic ones, with or without
attendant melodic profiles. The middle section of “Just You Wait,” for exam-
ple, anticipates the rhythm of “Get Me to the Church on Time” (Example
12.3). The eighteenth-century Alberti bass in the accompaniment of this sec-
tion, 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 speak-
ing 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
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5PQ S I U

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)

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 My Fair Lady

Example 12.3. Continued

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 down-
beat. 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
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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 reveal-
ing 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
5PQ S I U

problems. One of these songs, “Come to the Ball,” Lerner and Loewe’s sec-
ond 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

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 Enchanted Evenings

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 develop-
ment 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 prob-
lem 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
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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 explains 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 sen-
sitive Broadway critic and a staunch proponent of the integrated musical,
writes that when he sees a musical for the first time “the highest compliment
5PQ S I U

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:

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 My Fair Lady

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 hap-
pened 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 charac-
ters and situations.

Although much of My Fair Lady departs from Shaw’s play, its Cinder-
ella slant nevertheless constitutes an extraordinarily faithful adaptation to
Pascal’s filmed revision of Shaw’s original screenplay. Moreover, the music
of My Fair Lady for the most part accurately serves most of Shaw’s textual
ideas. Additionally, the songs themselves, which are carefully prepared and
advance the action in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, convey the
dramatic meaning that underlies this action.
One critical quandary remains. Just as Higgins neglects to consider the
question of what is to become of Eliza, Lerner and Loewe’s popular adapta-
tion of My Fair Lady poses the problem of what is to become of Shaw’s Pyg-
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malion, a play that noted literary critics, including Harold Bloom, consider to
be the playwright’s masterpiece.59 The relative decline of Shaw’s Pygmalion
in the wake of My Fair Lady seems especially lamentable.60
But even measured by Shavian standards, Lerner and Loewe’s clas-
sic musical is by no means overshadowed on artistic grounds. Readers of
Shaw’s play know, as Shaw knew, that Higgins would “never fall in love
with anyone under forty-five.”61 Indeed, marrying Freddy might have its
drawbacks, but marrying Higgins would be unthinkable. It is the ultimate
achievement of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady that the unthinkable has
become the probable.

Two years after My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe completed Gigi, the Acad-
5PQ S I U

emy Award–winning film adaptation of a Colette novella. Not wishing to

argue with success, Gigi, like My Fair Lady, tells the story of a young woman
who ends up with an older man—Cinderella revisited. The final Broadway
collaboration appeared two years later, Camelot (1960), a partially successful

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 Enchanted Evenings

attempt to recycle a production team (director Hart and Julie Andrews

as Guenevere, as well as a new, acclaimed, non-singing actor in the Har-
rison tradition, Richard Burton, as King Arthur). The box office magic of
the My Fair Lady “team” and a long televised segment on the Ed Sullivan
Show helped Camelot—the positive associations with President Kennedy
came later—to survive its extraordinarily bad critical press, growing ten-
sions between Lerner and Loewe, and Lerner’s hospitalization for bleeding
ulcers. Perhaps the most devastating blow of all was Hart’s sudden heart
attack and hospitalization, which forced the director to assume the unaccus-
tomed role of patient rather than that of play doctor, a role he had performed
so irreplaceably on My Fair Lady.
Even those who feel that Eliza should have gone off into the sunset (or
the fog) with Freddy rather than the misogynist Higgins might have second
thoughts about Guenevere’s decision to abandon her likable and desirable
husband Arthur for the younger but boorish and egotistical Lancelot. As
Engel writes: “It is not lack of fidelity that makes for our dissatisfaction but
an unmotivated, rather arbitrary choice that seemed to make no sense.”62
After Camelot, Lerner and Loewe would adapt Gigi for Broadway in 1973
(it ran for only three months). One year later they would work together on
new material for the last time in the film The Little Prince. With the excep-
tions of these brief returns, Loewe, who had collaborated exclusively with
Lerner ever since What’s Up? in 1943, retired on his laurels and died quietly
in 1988. The more restless Lerner, who as early as the 1940s had teamed
up with Weill on Love Life one year after Brigadoon, would collaborate with
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Burton Lane within five years after Camelot to create the modestly successful
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
For his last twenty years, Lerner without Loewe—and, in some respects
equally unfortunately, without Moss Hart, who died in 1961—would pro-
duce one failure after another. Not even the star quality of Katharine Hep-
burn in Coco (1970) could help this show with music by André Previn to run
more than a year. A potentially promising collaboration with the brilliant
Leonard Bernstein in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) closed within a week.
Other short-lived post-Camelot musicals included Lolita, My Love (1972), Car-
melina (1979), and Dance a Little Closer (1983) with music composed by John
Barry, Lane, and Charles Strouse, respectively. At the time of his death in
1986, the indefatigable librettist-lyricist had drafted much of a libretto and
several lyrics for yet another musical, this time based on the classic 1936 film
5PQ S I U

comedy, My Man Godfrey.63

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 Notes to Pages 254–261

40. Ibid., 5.
41. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 17.
43. According to Abba Bogin, Loesser’s musical assistant and rehearsal pianist in Fella and
a reliable source of practical and anecdotal information, “Ooh! My Feet” was originally
intended for Lieutenant Branigan in Guys and Dolls. See Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketch-
books,” 77–78.
44. Loesser Collection, 3004. A transcription of this “Big D” draft appears in Block, “Frank
Loesser’s Sketchbooks,” 65.
45. Loesser Collection, 2794, 2811, 2857–58, 2900–01, and 2915.
46. Loesser, “Some Loesser Thoughts on ‘The Most Happy Fella.’ ”
47. In the previous chapter it was suggested that Porter deprived Kiss Me, Kate of dramatic
nuance when he departed from his conceit that the Padua songs would distinguish them-
selves from the Baltimore songs through contrasting statements in the major and minor
modes.
48. Vocal score and libretto (New York: Frank Music, 1956, 1957), 67.
49. Sometimes Loesser’s melodic manipulations can be subtle to the point of inaudibility for
most listeners. For example, a transformed version of the “Tony” motive (the seconds have
now been inverted to become sevenths) can be detected during the final moments of act I,
when Rosabella “overcomes her resistance” and willingly accepts Joe’s sexual advances.
During the course of their kiss the “Tony” motive returns to the “sighing” seconds that
underscored Tony’s imaginary conversation. Vocal score, 126.
Moments later (near the beginning of act II) Loesser inserts another small musical detail
that conveys a dramatic message. In the fleeting moment between choruses of the uplift-
ing “Fresno Beauties” Joe and Rosabella sing their private thoughts in a duet that neither
can hear. The interval that separates the one-night lovers is the same minor seventh that
brought them together in the seduction music ending act I. Ibid., 133.
50. Ibid., 187–88.
51. Ibid., 252–53.
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52. Ibid., 257.

53. Burrows, “Frank Loesser: 1910–1969, New York Times, August 10, 1969.
54. Donald Malcolm, “Nymphs and Shepherds, Go Away,” New Yorker, March 19, 1960,
117–18.

Chapter 12: My Fair Lady

1. My Fair Lady’s performance run was not surpassed until nearly a decade later by Hello
Dolly! in 1971.
2. Walter Kerr, “ ‘My Fair Lady,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, March 16, 1956; quoted in Steven
Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 470–71 (quotation on 470); reprinted in New York Theatre
Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 346.
3. William Hawkins, “ ‘My Fair Lady’ Is a Smash Hit,” New York World-Telegram and The Sun,
March 16, 1956; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 470; reprinted in New York
Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 347.
5PQ S I U

4. Rex Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 114. According to Gene Lees, Porter was one of the
many who had turned down the Pygmalion adaptation (see note17). Gene Lees, Inventing
Champagne: The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, 88.

W112
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 Notes to Pages 262–265

5. Robert Coleman, “ ‘My Fair Lady’ Is a Glittering Musical,” Daily Mirror, March 16, 1956;
quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 470; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’
Reviews, vol. 17, 345.
6. John Chapman, “ ‘My Fair Lady’ a Superb, Stylish Musical Play with a Perfect Cast,” Daily
News, March 16, 1956; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 468 and 470 (quotation
on 468); reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, 17, 345.
7. Hawkins, “ ‘My Fair Lady,’ ” 347; Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 470.
8. Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: ‘My Fair Lady,’ ” New York Times, March 16, 1956, 20; quoted
in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 468. Reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews,
17, 347.
9. Gene Lees in Inventing Champagne and William W. Deguire, The New Grove Dictionary of
American Music and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera annotator, give 1901 as the date for
the composer’s birth (some earlier sources say 1904). Although Lees remains curiously
noncommittal in attributing the city of Loewe’s birth (Berlin or Vienna), Berlin is the set-
ting for all the biographical material that he offers for Loewe’s early years. Lees, Inventing
Champagne, 12–16; and William W. Deguire, “Loewe, Frederick,” The New Grove Dictionary
of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1985),
vol. 2, 101–3, and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan,
1992), vol. 2, 1306.
10. Lees, Inventing Champagne, 14.
11. It was noted in the previous chapter that the revue The Illustrators Show, which folded after
five performances, also marked the Broadway debut of Loesser, who wrote the lyrics of
several Irving Actman songs for this same show.
12. Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1926–1950 (New York: Viking, 1988), 528.
13. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1911–1925, (New York: Viking, 1985), 730–31. It
is clear from this letter, however, that Shaw’s motives were as much financial as they were
artistic.
14. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1926–1950, 817.
15. Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 30–135. See also Stephen Citron, Wordsmiths, 261–64,
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and Keith Garebian, The Making of “My Fair Lady” (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993).
16. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 36.
17. Ibid., 38. In Lees’s undocumented claim, Lerner and Loewe “knew that he [Pascal] had
previously approached Rodgers and Hammerstein, Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz,
Cole Porter, and E. Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy, all of whom had turned the project down as
fraught with insoluble book problems.” Gene Lees, Inventing Champagne, 88.
18. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 43–44.
19. In contrast to the Rodgers and Hammerstein prototype, in which the secondary characters
show some emotional or comic bond and sing to or about one another, My Fair Lady audi-
ences never actually meet Doolittle’s bride.
20. “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” would be abandoned in the Broadway version of Gigi
(1973).
21. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 50. Before it became My Fair Lady, Lady Liza was the show’s
working title.
22. Harrison attributed his idiosyncratic combination of speaking and singing to conductor
Bill Low. According to Harrison, Low informed him that “there is such a thing as talking
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on pitch—using only those notes that you want to use, picking them out of the score, some-
times more, sometimes less. For the rest of the time, concentrate on staying on pitch, even
though you’re only speaking.” Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 108.

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 Notes to Pages 265–266

23. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 65. Harrison places his meeting with Lerner, Loewe, and their
lawyer, Herman Levin, several months later “in the summer of 1955 . . . in the middle of the
London run of Bell, Book and Candle.” Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 106.
24. Lyricist-composers Porter and Loesser similarly gave their songs a title before composing a
tune. Lerner also shared the frustrations suffered by fellow lyricist-librettist Hammerstein.
While falling somewhat short of Rodgers’s legendary speed (e.g., “Bali Ha’i” allegedly
in five minutes, “Happy Talk” in twenty), the comparative ease and rapidity with which
Loewe composed melodies was a fate that Lerner too had to endure.
25. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 70.
26. Lerner places the creation of “The Rain in Spain,” his one “unexpected visitation from the
muses,” during a spontaneous ten-minute period after an audition (Ibid., 87). Harrison
contradicts Lerner when he recalls hearing “The Rain in Spain” along with “Lady Liza”
and “Please Don’t Marry Me” at his initial London meeting with Lerner, Loewe, and Levin.
Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 107.
27. Just as “Say a Prayer” would return two years later in the film Gigi, the main theme of
“Promenade” would return in both the film and subsequent stage versions of this show as
“She Is Not Thinking of Me.”
28. The chronology of “The Servants’ Chorus” must remain conjectural. The most likely
hypothesis is that it followed the inception of “The Rain in Spain” during rehearsals. The
fact that the lyrics were added in pen in the Library of Congress holograph score suggests,
but does not confirm, that they were a late addition.
29. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 70.
30. Ibid., 79. The earlier version of “Why Can’t the English?,” the lyrics of which Lerner dis-
cusses in his autobiography (Ibid., 79–80), can be found on the reverse sides of three song
holographs in the Loewe Collection of the Library of Congress: “I Could Have Danced All
Night,” “Show Me,” and “On the Street Where She Lives” (original title). Larry Stempel
notes their presence and their “Coward touch,” as exemplified in “Mad Dogs and English-
man,” in the first two of these holograph scores. See Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play
Expands,” 166, note 18.
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31. The holograph does not display a text over the underscoring as found on the vocal score
(152 and 159) or the right-hand accompaniment figure that is prominently featured a lit-
tle later (160 and 161). Also in the holograph the word “aren’” (to rhyme with “foreign”)
appears as “aren’t.”
32. A complete list for the spoken passages in the three mentioned Higgins songs follows:
“I’m an Ordinary Man” (“I’m an ordinary man,” “But let a . . . ” [all three times], “I’m a very
gentle man,” and “I’m a quiet-living man”) [the final spoken “Let a woman in your life”
does not appear on the holograph in any form]; “A Hymn to Him” (“What in all of Heaven
could have prompted her to . . . ” [the next word “go” is sung] and “Why can’t a . . . ” [the
next word “woman” is sung]; and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“I can see her
now,” “In a . . . ,” and “I’m a most forgiving man”).
Despite this increased tendency to replace song with speech-song, the holograph indicates
that some passages were originally spoken. For example: “A Hymn to Him” (“Why can’t a
woman be like that?,” “Why can’t a woman be like you?,” and “Why can’t a woman be like
us?”); and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“Damn!! Damn!! Damn!! Damn!!” and “I’ve
grown accustomed to her face!” at the beginning of the song, and later the “quasi recitative”
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“Poor Eliza! How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful!”). It should also be noted
that the holograph of the opening three syllables in Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “The
Lord a-,” indicates three sung pitches, a rising scale G-A-B leading to a C on “-bove.”

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 Notes to Pages 266–276

33. George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion/Alan Jay Lerner My Fair Lady (New York: Signet, 1975), 88.
34. As late as February 23, 1948, ten years after the film version of Pygmalion, Shaw would
write, “I absolutely forbid the Campbell interpolation [‘What size’] or any suggestion that
the middle-aged bully and the girl of eighteen are lovers.” Laurence, ed., Collected Letters
1926–1950, 815.
35. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1911–1925, 227.
36. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Volume II, 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power (New York:
Random House, 1989), 339.
37. Ibid., 340.
38. Donald P. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye: Shaw and the Cinema. Costello discusses each of the
fourteen scenes that appear in the film but not its screenplay; he also offers a useful appen-
dix, “From Play to Screen Play to Sound Track: A Textual Comparison of Three Versions of
Act V of Shaw’s Pygmalion.”
39. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 187–88.
40. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1926–1950, 532–33.
41. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 93–94. The remaining quotations in this paragraph can be found on
p. 94.
42. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 76.
43. Considering its indebtedness to the Pascal film, it is not surprising that on the title page of the
My Fair Lady vocal score, Lerner and Loewe were requested to include the phrase “adapted
from Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ produced on the screen by Gabriel Pascal,” and that Pascal
would receive 1 percent of the My Fair Lady royalties. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 68.
44. The exercises themselves appeared in the film (but not the published screenplay): “The rain
in Spain stays mainly in the plain” for vowels and “in Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire
hurricanes hardly ever happen” for aspirate h’s. See the stage photograph of this latter
exercise on p. 271 and its counterpart in the film on p. 323.
45. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 140.
46. The opening notes of Loewe’s melody are identical to the opening of Brahms’s intermezzo
for piano in C♯ minor, op. 117, no. 3. On the subject of musical quotation, Tosca’s “Non la
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sospiri la nostra casetta” in act I of her opera bears an uncanny melodic resemblance to
Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck.” In contrast to Blitzstein’s and Bernstein’s significant
classical borrowings, neither of these possible My Fair Lady borrowings was apparently cho-
sen to make a dramatic point.
47. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 196.
48. Ibid., 199.
49. More remote and perhaps unintentional are the melodic correspondences between the open-
ing A sections of “On the Street Where You Live” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”
In any event, it makes sense that a dramatically transformed Higgins would sing a varia-
tion of Freddy’s lovesick tune. After all, Higgins could easily have heard Freddy’s song on
any number of the many occasions Eliza’s would-be suitor performed it under his window.
Although the causes are less dramatically explicable, it is also arguable that “On the Street
Where You Live” is melodically derived from “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
50. It might be recalled that the rhythm of “Get Me to the Church on Time” was anticipated in
the middle portion of “Just You Wait,” where it was preceded by an upbeat.
51. The full text of “Come to the Ball” is located in Benny Green, ed., A Hymn to Him: The Lyrics
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of Alan Jay Lerner, 109–10. Loewe’s holograph score can be found in folder 15 of the Loewe
Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
52. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 88–89.

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 Notes to Pages 276–279

53. Ibid., 106.

54. Ibid., 106–7. Lerner went on to explain how “quite unwittingly, the new scene also solved
our one major costume problem.” In contrast to the original ball scene when Eliza’s elegant
gown was unable to stand out from the splendor of the other gowns, “in the new scene she
appeared at the top of the stairs in Higgins’ house in her ball gown, and the audience broke
into applause.” Ibid., 108.
55. The original text of “On the Street Where You Live” appears in Green, ed., A Hymn to Him,
96. Lerner commented on and performed the opening night version of this song in “An
Evening with Alan Jay Lerner” at the 92nd Street Y, December 12, 1971 (Book-of-the-Month
Records 70–524; re-released on DRG 5175 [1977])
56. Shaw introduces Freddy and his ineffectual attempts to hail a cab as well as his sister Clara
in act I; Lerner and Loewe do not present Freddy until Ascot, and they drop the role of
Clara altogether.
57. Lehman Engel, Words with Music, 116. All quotations in this and the following paragraph
can be found on p. 116.
58. In contrast to Engel, Lerner described “the flagrantly romantic lyric that kept edging on the
absurd” as “exactly right for the character.” Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 106.
59. Harold Bloom, ed., George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), vii
and 1–10.
60. The demise of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, Sidney Howard’s They Knew What
They Wanted, and Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, and their displacement by Porgy and Bess, The
Most Happy Fella, and Carousel has been accepted with equanimity by theater audiences and
producers. Fortunately, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet have so
far been spared a similar fate.
61. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 43. The original Mrs. Patrick Campbell was a youthful forty-eight
at the time she introduced the role of Eliza.
62. Engel, Words with Music, 87.
63. For all of Lerner’s shows after Camelot see Benny Green, ed., A Hymn to Him for Lerner’s
lyrics, and, in the case of My Man Godfrey, his outline and scenario.
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Chapter 13: West Side Story

1. In his autobiography Harold Prince acknowledged that he closed the show six months
prematurely. Harold Prince, Contradictions, 39–40.
2. West Side Story was surpassed in first-run longevity by twenty-two shows that premiered
before 1960 (see “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959 and 1920–
2008 in the online website), including several concurrent hits that had not yet completed
their initial runs: Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, and, of course, My Fair
Lady, which opened the year before. Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, which first paraded
on Broadway two months after West Side Story and eventually ran for 1,375 performances,
also eclipsed the Romeo and Juliet adaptation when it won the Tony for best musical of 1957.
The London version of West Side Story was voted the Best Musical of the Year 1960. If one
were to take into account the return engagement that directly followed West Side Story’s
tour, however, its place in the 1920–1959 list would rise to fourteenth and the 985 perfor-
mance total would move West Side Story up to eighth place on the Broadway scoreboard for
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the decade, less than 100 performances below Pajama Game and Damn Yankees in sixth and
seventh position, respectively. The point is that despite the difficulty of raising the needed
$350,000, despite the cast of virtual unknowns, despite the fact that about a hundred people

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