http://www.marksteyn.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=28

SUMMER STOCK
While The New Criterion takes its July/August break, we're posting a
couple of pieces on the shows everybody knows and the fellows who wrote
them. Here's Mark's profile of the men who wrote Brigadoon, Paint Your
Wagon, My Fair Lady, Gigi and Camelot, from the Royal National Theatre
programme for Trevor Nunn's production of My Fair Lady:

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After their success with On the Town, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and
Adolph Green were asked to take a look at musicalising Pygmalion. A
screening of the 1938 film version was arranged, and Lenny, Betty and
Adolph trooped in. Two hours later, they trooped out, determined to leave
it alone. "It's perfect," said Adolph Green. "Don't touch it."

They were right -- and wrong. Right, because hit plays rarely make hit
musicals, and those few that do usually require some novelty tweak --
Romeo and Juliet transposed to New York's West Side, The Taming of the
Shrew as the play-within-the-play for a backstage yarn. Even after My Fair
Lady was the toast of New York, some Broadway professionals retained an
ambivalence about it, nicely caught in a Sondheim lyric from Merrily We
Roll Along:

   I saw My Fair Lady.
   I sort of enjoyed it.

Many composers, lyricists and librettists sort of enjoyed My Fair Lady,
but couldn't quite see the need for it. Pygmalion was perfect; why touch
it?

But that's where they and Bernstein, Comden and Green were wrong. There's
no such thing as a great idea or a lousy idea for a musical: it all
depends in whose head the light bulb lights up. Phantom of the Opera is a
lousy idea for a Rodgers and Hart musical, but just dandy for an Andrew
Lloyd Webber one. And that's the way it went with Pygmalion. If a writer's
lucky, just once in his lifetime he collides with the perfect subject. For
Lloyd Webber, it was Phantom. For Lerner and Loewe, it was My Fair Lady.
They had hits before (Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon) and after (Gigi,
Camelot), but this is the show that defines the team at their best --
Loewe worldly and a little detached, the kind of composer who's sceptical
of a big musical-comedy "Wow! I'm In Love!" number but is prepared to
allow that "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face"; Lerner urbane, literate
and such an anglophile that, having stumbled on a lyrical style for Henry
Higgins, he found that, ever after, his first draft of every song sounded
as if it were written for Rex Harrison.

Fritz Loewe was born in Vienna exactly a century ago and at the age of 15
wrote a Mittel European million-seller called "Katrina". It was his first
hit song, and his last for over 30 years. His parents brought him to
America, where he became a cowboy, a gold prospector and then a
prizefighter. With hindsight, it would be easy to read this eclectic
resume as a determined attempt at cultural assimilation, lacking as it
does only a spell as comic-book illustrator and G-man. But such an
interpretation would be mistaken. Richard Rodgers once described Jerome
Kern as a composer with one foot in the Old World, one in the New. But
that still puts him one foot ahead of Loewe. Panning for gold, branding
his longhorns, tying his four-legged friend to the hitching post outside
the Dead Man's Gulch saloon, Fritz Loewe's feet nevertheless remained,
musically speaking, firmly in Old Vienna. Jazz, swing, musical comedy
passed him by, and it wasn't until the mid-1940s that the Rodgers and
Hammerstein school of musical play -- Oklahoma!, Carousel -- created a
more hospitable climate for Loewe's talents.

In 1942, looking for the men's room at the Lambs Club in New York, he
bumped into Alan Jay Lerner, a moneyed young man struggling to break into
showbusiness despite the crippling burdens of having been educated at
Bedales in England and then, back in America, at Choate, where his
classmates included John F Kennedy. Lerner and Loewe had very little in
common except that (as I can testify from experience) both had a tendency
to address one as "Dear boy". Whether Lerner acquired the affectation from
Loewe or vice-versa, it somehow encapsulates what set them apart from
other, more indigenous Broadway teams.

Otherwise, they were opposites: Loewe wrote fast, musical ideas dashed off
almost insouciantly. When Lerner suggested a musical elocution lesson
built around the phrase "The rain in Spain", Loewe said, "Good. I'll write
a tango" -- and played the main theme there and then. Lerner, on the other
hand, sweated over every phrase. He wore white gloves when he wrote,
otherwise he'd gnaw his fingers to the bone. He had a special desk so that
he could write standing up: if he sat down, he focused so hard on the
lyric that he'd go into a trance. To the end of his life, he was a great
disdainer of that songwriter's standby, the anthropomorphized heart,
citing the famous song from The Sound of Music in which Sister Maria's
heart wants to leap, sigh, laugh, sing, etc. "One chorus and I need an
oxygen tent," he said. Yet, agonizing over the lyric to 'I Could Have
Danced All Night', he found himself forced to fall back on "When all at
once my heart took flight." He never liked it, swore he'd come up with
something better, yet never could.

Lerner and Loewe were opposites off-stage, too. Having been a struggling
youngster till late middle-age, Loewe suddenly discovered he was rich
enough to enjoy the good life, and in 1960, after Camelot, quit Broadway
for Palm Springs and the Riviera. He spent the next three decades at the
gaming tables, and died a wealthy man. Lerner, by contrast, worked till
his death in 1986 and died a wholly owned subsidiary of the Internal
Revenue Service and his platoon of ex-wives. Loewe was an inveterate
womaniser, Lerner a serial monogamist, married eight times. To discuss
Alan without reference to his relationship with the opposite sex would be
absurd, for it runs right through his work, up to one of his very last and
most autobiographical lyrics:

   I've tossed and turned and couldn't sleep
   From counting minks instead of sheep
   I've Been Married
   I've practiced writing epitaphs
   And read the Book of Job for laughs
   I've Been Married...

If it has the slightly dated whiff of Vegas alimony gags, well, no one was
more entitled to do them than Alan. After one rehearsal for Fair Lady, he
and Rex Harrison were strolling down Fifth Avenue reflecting on their
mutual much-marriedness when Harrison suddenly stopped and said in a loud
voice which turned more than a few heads: "Alan! Wouldn't it be marvellous
if we were both homosexual?" Alan didn't think so, but he walked home and
en route reworded the question: "Why can't a woman be more like a man?"
Professor Higgins' charming misogyny struck a chord in both Lerner and
Loewe, and indeed Lerner appreciated the premise of Pygmalion -- young
unformed woman moulded by older sophisticated man -- so much that he
couldn't stop writing it. Two years after Fair Lady, he wrote Gigi: young
unformed woman, older sophisticated man. In 1971, with Bond composer John
Barry, he musicalised Lolita: older sophisticated man, young unformed
...ah, but that proved one reprise too many of 'Thank Heaven For Little
Girls'.

No musical is truly autobiographical -- there are too many hands involved
-- but with Pygmalion Lerner and Loewe, the characters, the pretext and
the Edwardian milieu were made for each other. What Rodgers and
Hammerstein and others who turned down the property saw as its main defect
-- the lack of romance -- turned out to be a virtue: Loewe was suspicious
of passion, and for Lerner what Higgins does to Eliza is romantic. That
aside, both men understood that the principals didn't need big, bold love
duets: the romance would be supplied by the audience, silently urging them
on regardless of what anybody said or sang.

That's a good example of how successful musicals manage to have their cake
and eat it.

The trick, said Lerner, was to be specific -- to the plot and character --
yet also universal. The score of My Fair Lady rides those twin horses
brilliantly. "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" comes direct from Shaw:
"I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance." Put like that, it
sounds rather clinical. But nudged just a little and set to Loewe's
beguilingly conversational melody it stays true to the play yet also
expresses something more general about the kind of love that steals up on
you. There's a wonderfully bleary recording by Dean Martin whose mood
couldn't be more different from the original context: it sounds like a guy
waking up in his pad and discovering that last night's one-night stand has
decided to stay for breakfast. Lerner and Loewe didn't write the song for
Dino, but they knew enough not to rule him out.

As to what Shaw would have made of it, we can only guess. Asked whom he
wanted to compose the music for Pygmalion, he replied Mozart. You can't
blame him. The last Shavian musical, The Chocolate Soldier (1908), was
such a crass reduction of Arms and the Man that Shaw insisted all
programmes and posters carry a public disclaimer by him. In that sense at
least, My Fair Lady redeems musical theatre for the sins of its fathers.
From the opening number, 'Why Can't The English Teach Their Children How
To Speak?', Fair Lady declares that this is, paradoxically or not, a
musical about words. Lerner was punctilious on the subject of language, at
one point rebuking Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley for writing 'Who Can
I Turn To?'. He felt it should have been 'Whom Can I Turn To?' (Surely you
mean 'To Whom Can I Turn?', I suggested.) Bricusse replied with a note
pointing out a rare Lerner solecism from My Fair Lady:

   By rights you should be taken out and hanged
   For the cold blooded murder of the English tanged.

But, as Lerner always said of lyric-writing, the clever word-play is the
easy stuff. One of my favourite songs in the score is 'Show Me', the
moment when Eliza, mightily sick of words, demands something more: it's a
lovely jest, in a work so articulate, to produce a song recognizing the
limits of that articulacy, and it's one reason why My Fair Lady -- from
source material to adaptation -- sums up better than any other the
ambitions of the post-war musical play. It was the perfect musical play,
Andre Previn, a sometime Lerner composing partner, told me. "But it was so
perfect that afterwards, what else could you do?"

My Fair Lady was the last word as far as that kind of musical was
concerned. So Broadway turned to dance musicals, and rock musicals, and
concept musicals, and through-composed musicals, and none of them ever
really stuck around long enough to become a viable living tradition. Fritz
Loewe understood he could never top Fair Lady, and flew off to Palm
Springs. Alan Lerner kept trying, an unenviable task.

Today we can enjoy the work for what it is: a superb example of how, in
the right hands, no material is beyond the range of musical theatre.

--- Peter T. Chattaway ---------------------------
peter@... ---
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they
   claim remembrance, on account of their scars. -- Chris Marker, La Jetee

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