Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh, Dominic (e reader comics TXT) 📕

very thorough in mentioning the locations, times, musical numbers, and characters involved in each scene, in contrast to the previous outlines.

At first glance, it may seem that Outline 4 represents the published show, but there are several important additions and omissions. At the start, there is reference to a song for the Buskers. Assuming that this is not the orchestral “Opening” that depicts Covent Garden after the Overture, this could have been an additional scene-setting song in the style of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” Neither of Doolittle’s songs has a title, hinting they had not yet been written, and scene 4 does not have the reprise of his first number either. Scene 5 has a “montage of lessons” song (which became “Poor Professor Higgins”) both before and after “Just You Wait,” whereas it only appears after Eliza’s song in the published version. Another obvious difference is that “I Could Have Danced All Night” had not yet been written and an earlier song, “Shy,” was in its place. On the other hand, scene 6 is similar to the published script, except that Higgins appears to have been the person talking to his mother outside the racecourse, rather than Pickering; obviously, the latter character benefited from an extra moment of humor in the final show, especially in light of the extent to which Pickering’s role had been reduced from the initial outlines.

Table 3.4.Outline 3

Lord and Lady Boxley (scene 7) later became Lord and Lady Boxington, and in this version the Policeman in scene 8 has been replaced by possible Street Strollers. The sequence of musical numbers in scene 9 was still in its original form, unsurprisingly, but the next few scenes seem to be roughly in their published state. A crucial exception is Liza’s apparent exclusion from the group reprise of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” Scene 4 is now in place, with the exception of “A Hymn to Him” (which was added much later), and only the location of scene 5 is unfamiliar: this outline has it in Mrs. Higgins’s garden, rather than her conservatory (in the final show). It is also worth noting that the reprise of “You Did It,” with which Higgins interrupts Eliza’s “Without You,” is already fixed and not a late addition as Lerner claimed in his memoir. The setting for Higgins’s final song is also unfamiliar: the location by the Thames is still an anomaly since, as noted above, a scene in Higgins’s house cannot “immediately follow” one on the Embankment because the two are geographically displaced. The final scene is crowned by a reprise of “Shy” rather than “I Could Have Danced All Night” because the latter had not yet been written. It is interesting to note that this aspect of the structure of the show—the reprisal of Eliza’s first-act putative “love song”—was already firmed up. One might easily have thought that the last-minute return to the “I Could Have Danced” music was a way of bringing the curtain down on what the composer and lyricist guessed could be the show’s hit song, but gesture was clearly the highest priority all along. In conclusion, Outline 4 reveals that although the musical follows Pygmalion quite closely, many factors had to be created or changed along the way, as the numerous differences between this late outline and the published script demonstrate. By extension, this shows how deliberate, considered, and thoughtfully contrived the piece is.

REFINING THE TEXT

The main text to be considered in this section is the document labeled “Rehearsal Script” in Herman Levin’s papers.39 There are a couple of hundred differences between the musical’s identified rehearsal script and the published script, and these afford an insight into the last-minute polishing done by Lerner and the director, Moss Hart, during the rehearsal period. Curiously, the authorship of Lerner’s book has sometimes been called into question, with the suggestion that Moss Hart was in effect the co-author. For instance, his wife, Kitty Carlisle Hart, mentions that Lerner and Hart “went to Atlantic City for a week to work on the script” and adds that when she asked Hart about it, he replied that “he was hired as the director, and the fact that he was a writer-director didn’t make any difference.” On the other hand, Steven Bach reports that Lerner’s production associate Stone Widney—who was present during the writing and rehearsal stages—remembered Hart contributing “very little to the book.” No evidence remains in Moss Hart’s papers in Wisconsin of the director’s additions either, and the issue cannot easily be resolved. Therefore, for the purposes of this book Lerner is referred to as the author of the script, even though there is no doubt that Hart’s contributions were vital to its success.40

Diction seems to be one of the main concerns of Lerner’s revision of the script. Often he changed just a couple of words or the word order to make it as convincing as possible, especially in the cockney scenes. For example, Eliza’s “Two bunches of violets trod into the mud” (rehearsal script [hereafter RS], 1-1-1) becomes simply “ … trod in the mud” (published script [PS], 2).41 This is a small change, but it makes the line sound shorter and more abrupt, as well as introducing a grammatical mistake (Shaw’s Pygmalion has “into”).42 Rather than detailing all such changes, however, this section deals mainly with the ways in which the differences between the rehearsal and published scripts had implications for the central relationships in the piece.

Defining Doolittle

The biggest changes made during rehearsals were to the part of Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s father, one of the show’s most vibrant characters. His relationships to the other characters shifted in focus, and some of the darker aspects of his personality were obscured. For example:

RS (1-2-13)

DOOLITTLE: Well, I’m willing to marry her. It’s me that suffers by it. I’ve no hold on her. I got to be agreeable to her. I got to give her presents. I got to buy her clothes something sinful. I’m a slave to that