Rodgers and Hammerstein worked on it for more than a year before giving up. Cole Porter, Noel Coward and other leading lights looked at the idea and decided it couldn't be done.
Fortunately for the history of musical theater, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe persevered beyond a fruitless year of trying to turn George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" into a musical. The breakthrough revelation came to Lerner after he and Loewe had abandoned the concept and begun work on other projects. In theater historian Ethan Mordden's perceptive description (from his chronicle of the '50s on Broadway, "Coming Up Roses"): "Lerner didn't make 'Pygmalion' into a musical. He made a musical into 'Pygmalion.' "
The result, "My Fair Lady," opened 50 years ago today at Broadway's Mark Hellinger Theatre. It wasn't just the hit of an undistinguished season. It was the hit of one of the great decades of the American musical, the longest-running show (almost seven years) Broadway had ever seen, a mark that wouldn't be broken for another 12 years (by "Fiddler on the Roof"). It spun off a record number of foreign productions, not to mention the top-selling original cast album. By 1965, Lerner estimated in his memoir, "The Street Where I Live," the show, albums and movie had grossed more than $800 million.
It's also firmly entrenched on most critics' all-time top 10 lists and remains so popular that it's almost always being performed somewhere (Diablo Light Opera's current revival runs through Saturday in Walnut Creek). "The 'War and Peace' of musicals," Mordden exclaims, "the Mona Lisa, Taj Mahal, 'Don Juan,' caviar, 'Wizard of Oz.' The One."
Yes, that's going a bit overboard. "War and Peace" makes it sound like a long slog through the rainy plains of Spain. But "My Fair Lady" is so easy to love, so gracefully put together and so densely seasoned with Shaw's provocative wit that it's easy to overlook how significantly it changed the shape of musicals to come. Even -- perhaps especially -- those of us who were fortunate enough to see that first Broadway run were too impressed by Rex Harrison, enchanted by Julie Andrews, bowled over by Stanley Holloway and enraptured by Moss Hart's brilliant production to appreciate the extent to which the play was changing the ground rules for musical comedy.
It wasn't the kind of watershed event that "Oklahoma!" had been in '43, when Rodgers and Hammerstein's first collaboration established the primacy of the integrated book musical for the rest of the century. But "My Fair Lady" broke the rules to which even Rodgers and Hammerstein adhered, and that prevented them from solving the "Pygmalion" puzzle. This is the pioneer musical with no big chorus numbers or standout dance segment. This is the first smash musical written for a leading man who can't sing. There's no essential secondary couple providing a comic parallel to the lead love story. In fact, there's no love story at all.
"How, may I ask, does one write a non-love song?" Lerner said of the quandary he and Loewe faced when they began. The solution he found -- with considerable help from Shaw and Harrison -- is a large part of what elevates "Lady" above most of its contemporaries and every other show Lerner and Loewe wrote before ("Brigadoon," "Paint Your Wagon") and after ("Camelot," "Gigi").
The original idea for turning "Pygmalion" into a stage musical -- an idea Shaw had refused to consider -- came from Gabriel Pascal, the notoriously eccentric Romanian (though he claimed to be Hungarian) producer to whom Shaw had entrusted the film rights for his plays (he produced the classic 1938 Leslie Howard-Wendy Hiller "Pygmalion" movie). Shaw was already dead. So was Pascal by the time Lerner and Loewe realized that the secret wasn't to try to turn "Pygmalion" into a standard musical, but to preserve and enhance as much of the play as possible.
Lerner's chronicle of the process is revelatory. Without waiting for their lawyers to sort out the convoluted rights, he and Loewe plunged into developing a few ideas and writing several songs (most, later discarded). One stroke of genius lay in casting the principal roles before they wrote them, aided by the memorable characters Shaw had already created.
Harrison was the key to Lerner's vision. He and Loewe flew to London to convince Harrison that, no, Leslie Howard was not the definitive Henry Higgins (too empathetic), and that it didn't matter that Harrison couldn't sing ("My range is about one-and-a-half notes," he later told the New York Times). To a large extent, it was the musical qualities of Harrison's speech ("He is instinctively musical," Lerner wrote) that inspired the great talk-songs that seem to flow so naturally from the largely Shavian dialogue. It was also the serially married Harrison's embattled attitudes about the many women in his life that led directly to some of Lerner's more memorable lyrics.
The trips to London to secure Harrison also landed Holloway, the great English music hall veteran, as Eliza Doolittle's lovable reprobate father, and a commitment from Cecil Beaton to design the costumes. A very early-morning venture to Covent Garden's fruit market, in bone-chilling fog, inspired the ideas and language of "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," the beguiling song that establishes the creature-comfort limitations of Eliza's dreams (an overheard "absobloodylutely" became the flower girl's yearning "Oh so loverly sittin' absobloominletely still").
Back in New York, the collaborators stumbled upon an 18-year-old Andrews in her first Broadway lead, "The Boy Friend," and found their ideal Eliza -- the first major Eliza who was about the same age as the character. Well before the rights were secured, and before they'd approached Hart about directing, Lerner and Loewe had their principal actors and design team in place. They wrote the songs specifically for the actors. Shaw, Lerner wrote in "The Musical Theatre," "was an ideal 'collaborator' because there was so much oblique and unstated emotion that could be dramatized in music and lyrics."
The genius of that collaboration owes a great deal to Loewe's brilliantly sophisticated score, with its blithe tweaking of English propriety ("Ascott Gavotte"), boisterous bursts of music hall joy ("Get Me to the Church on Time"), exhilarating eruptions of anger ("Just You Wait"), buoyantly swift waltz ("I Could Have Danced All Night") and gleefully unexpected tango ("The Rain in Spain"). Few musicals contain so many memorable melodies.
But the greatest achievement of "Lady" is its fidelity to Shaw's still popular "Pygmalion" (to be a featured attraction of Shakespeare Santa Cruz's 25th season). Despite its famously tweaked ending, with Eliza returning to Higgins (a resolution Shaw denied was possible, but wrote into his screenplay), "Lady" remains true to the story, enlarges the key characters, celebrates Shaw's wit and retains his central theme about the artificiality of class distinctions. The most apt analysis of its success remains the great Al Hirschfeld's original poster (and album cover) cartoon of a marionette Eliza manipulated by a puppet Higgins whose strings are in the hands of a celestial Shaw.
One stroke of genius was Lerner and Loewe's insertion of "Loverly" and the showstopping "With a Little Bit of Luck" to exemplify the poverty Eliza wishes to rise above and the gleeful iconoclasm of Shaw's "undeserving poor" ("They're always throwin' goodness at you/ But with a little bit of luck/ A man can duck"). Another was the inspired creation of "The Rain in Spain" to dramatize the grueling process Eliza undergoes.
Perhaps Lerner's greatest achievement, though, is the extent to which his lyrics fill out Higgins, a feat in which Harrison played no small part. As Lerner tells it, he was continually rewriting to meet Harrison's objections, suggestions or vocal patterns.
Late in the process, when rehearsals had finally begun, Lerner realized he needed another song for Higgins to express his fury, frustration and unconscious longing when Eliza leaves him. Walking down Fifth Avenue with Harrison, the two men were commiserating with each other about their many failed marriages and Harrison's current emotional entanglements, when the actor proclaimed "in a loud voice that attracted a good bit of attention, 'Alan! Wouldn't it be marvelous if we were homosexuals?!' "
Lerner returned to his hotel and promptly wrote "A Hymn to Him," the character- and show-defining anthem of misogyny that asks, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" To Lerner's everlasting credit -- and Shaw's, and Harrison's -- the triumph of "Lady" lies in the brilliance and honesty of its exposure of attitudes its progenitors shared.
