"My Fair Lady" Comes to Life in Show Bio
"Loverly: The Life & Times of 'My Fair Lady'"
by Dominic McHugh
Reviewed by
David Marshall James
Timing is everything, particularly in The Theater, and events coalesced during the early-to-mid 1950s to facilitate the transformation of George Bernard Shaw's five-act play "Pygmalion" (1913) into a two-act Broadway musical.
The show probably wouldn't have ever come to life without the determination of lyricist/librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe.
Indeed, Rodgers and Hammerstein wouldn't touch the project, nor would Noel Coward, who went on to refuse the role of Prof. Henry Higgins on the several occasions he was requested to take it.
Not that Lerner and Loewe had an easy time of it. The first attempt to conduct the experiment-- with Mary Martin as Eliza Doolittle-- rather mercifully, in hindsight, failed.
A few years later, Julie Andrews was scoring a triumph with her first Broadway musical, "The Boy Friend." Additionally, Lerner and Loewe had set their sights on Rex Harrison to portray Higgins, the master of phonetics who plucks a Cockney flower girl from Covent Garden and prepares to pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball, with a tryout at the Ascot races.
Everyone loves a good makeover, mais oui?
Trouble is, what is Eliza to do after the ball is over? Therein lay the thickets and sticky wickets for Lerner, as author Dominic McHugh relates through extensive documentation of primary sources.
G.B. Shaw became so frustrated with the playing of "Pygmalion" as a romantic piece with an ultimately "come-around" Higgins, that he wrote an epilogue to later published editions of the play, in which he details that Eliza marries her young, rich, handsome, yet dullard suitor, Freddy Eynsford-Hill.
Nevertheless, when Gabriel Pascal produced "Pygmalion" as a 1938 film starring Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard (one year away from portraying Ashley Wilkes in "Gone With the Wind"), the producer pulled a trick on Shaw, who wrote the screenplay, filming an alternative final scene that includes the famous line from Higgins, "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?"
Lerner's high-wire act was to maintain the Shavian flavor of "Pygmalion" in both libretto and lyrics, while eliminating much of the speechiness of the orignal's dialogue. Simultaneously, he wanted to keep the relationship between Eliza and Higgins as ambiguous as possible.
Yes, they effect a rapprochement at final curtain; however, do they commence a romance as well? Shaw left no doubt in his epilogue that the future, offstage union is between Eliza and Freddy. However, theater audiences are free to imagine what they will, and Lerner obviously desired to leave the "Higgins/Eliza romance" option open to a theatergoer's imagination without explicitly encouraging the notion, either in book or lyrics.
Eliza and Higgins will remain good friends, and won't they be the better for it ...?
Author McHugh, a lecturer in music at the University of Sheffield (U.K.), emphasizes the development of the book and score of "My Fair Lady," including what songs were composed and discarded, as well as which lyrics were dropped and/or revised.
For instance, Harrison thought that his opening number, "Why Can't the English?," originally bore too much of a resemblance to Coward's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," so Lerner revamped the lyrics.
More than 56 years have passed since the opening night of "My Fair Lady." McHugh recounts the major Broadway and West End revivals of the show, some of them revisionist.
Wouldn't it be loverly if a new film version were produced, less "dreamlike" (as the film's director, George Cukor, called it) than the 1964 original with Harrison and Audrey Hepburn: An authentically British period piece, if you will, featuring some actual locations instead of soundstage sets.
Hugh Grant seems born to play Prof. Henry Higgins; furthermore, he has greater sex appeal than Harrison did. Audiences took to the 1938 "Pygmalion" film for the same reason. One can certainly imagine Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard engaging in a romance; whereas, it's more of a long shot with Harrison and Julie Andrews, or Audrey Hepburn.
Even if Shaw wouldn't like it.
