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

Ex. 4.3. Extract from the refrain of Higgins’s “Please Don’t Marry Me.”

The verse (not included in ex. 4.3) shows Loewe’s freedom of form: after the simple lines of the first eight bars, the time signature briefly changes to 6/8 while he quotes the traditional song “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes,” the romantic lyric of which Higgins mocks (“I hate that optical brew”). But again, the song is of interest because it contains material, which would later become familiar in another context. The melody in bars 36–43 is similar to that of bars 8–16 of the song “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” from Camelot (1960), as shown in example 4.4. The wittiness of some of the lyric writing is not entirely foreign to the way the Professor’s character was ultimately sketched, for instance the couplet: “That someday you’d abhor me would torture me with fears, / But having you adore me would bore me to tears.” But given the upbeat, comic character of the lyric, it seems likely that the accompaniment was quite jolly and that the tempo was fast, making “Please Don’t Marry Me” a glossy Broadway number that would have been incoherent with Higgins’s other songs.

Ex. 4.4. Extract from “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” from Camelot.

Similarly, the next unused song, “There’s a Thing Called Love,” is uncharacteristic of Eliza’s completed numbers. The lyric alone tells us that this is a typical love song:

There’s a thing called love

In the twinkling of an eye you know the meaning of.

There’s a thing called love—

By the count of one

The lovely deed is done!

A precious thing called love—

When it’s yours you know how much it’s worth.

You can tell despair

Farewell, despair,

Love came in time,

And made me glad that I’m

On earth!9

The number was probably intended for the position later taken by “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Eliza’s sentiments make sense in the context of having succeeded in pronouncing “The Rain in Spain” correctly and gained a new warmth from Higgins, with whom she now fancies herself to be in love.10 Again, such an expression of love was probably too overt for Lerner’s overall plan for the show, so it is not surprising that it was cut. However, the melody later resurfaced as “In this Wide, Wide, World” in the 1973 stage version of Gigi.

The next song also contains material that was subsequently reused. In his first memoir, Rex Harrison says that when Lerner and Loewe first came to talk to him about doing the show, “There was a number called ‘Lady Liza’, a very pushy sort of Broadway tune which Fritz later turned into a waltz and used in the ballroom scene.”11 Curiously, in his second autobiography, the actor contradicts himself and says that the song “was skillfully turned into ‘The Ascot Gavotte,’” but he was correct the first time.12 As with “Please Don’t Marry Me,” the intended context of “Lady Liza” is apparent from Outlines 1 and 2 (see chap. 3). After Eliza’s debacle at Ascot, Higgins and Pickering discover her crying on a park bench, convinced she cannot succeed. But “the men persuade her she can. They do it in a song, which they sing together to her: ‘Lady Liza.’”13

Ex. 4.5. “Lady Liza.”

The manuscript for the song is in two parts. On the front cover is the melody, with “Higgins/Pickering” marked to the left of the title. Inside the folded manuscript is another title, “Liza—Counter,” while on two bracketed systems are the same Higgins/Pickering melody plus a counterpoint for “Jane” and “Math,” presumably the maids. The start of this combined version of the piece is shown in example 4.5. As Harrison says, the melody of the first four bars was transformed into the beginning of “The Embassy Waltz,” but the rest of it is different. The version of the song with the counterpoint was probably intended for a reprise after Ascot mentioned in Outlines 1 and 2, to conclude Eliza’s second series of lessons (“At the end of the sequence Liza is doing everything beautifully and the chorus sings, ‘Lady Liza’”).14

Although the melody is unremarkable and the lyric full of clichés—such as “gray above once again blue”—the servants’ counterpoint is notable for its wit. “Is it malaria? Or something scarier?” they ask, on seeing Eliza, Higgins, and Pickering jubilant after her transformation. In essence, this reaction was eventually replaced by two earlier reactions: first, Mrs. Pearce’s lines after she has been awoken by the pounding noise made by the trio when they sing “The Rain in Spain” (“Are you feeling all right, Mr. Higgins?”); and second, the maids’ interjections in Eliza’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” which similarly provide a contrasting viewpoint on the main theme being heard (“You’re up too late, miss, / And sure as fate, miss, / You’ll catch a cold”). In the published show, of course, this material is shown before the Ascot scene rather than after it, because the final part of Eliza’s transformation happens offstage and we see only the result, not the process. The words for the remaining verses of the song are provided in the collection of lyrics in Levin’s papers. This lyric sheet shows that the last line of every verse is changed from the indefinite to the personal article: “You’ll be a lady” becomes “You’ll be my lady” in the first two verses and “One day my lady will Liza be!” in the final one. This is yet another example of the far more explicit positing of Higgins as Eliza’s lover in Lerner and Loewe’s early ideas for the show.

Like “Please Don’t Marry Me” and “There’s a Thing Called Love,” “Lady Liza” was probably dropped from the score because it simply does not fit either the style of the piece or the characterization of the main protagonists as they were ultimately evolved. These three manuscripts provide us with a window into the composer’s workshop, showing how Loewe dealt with both microlevel details such as word-setting and macrolevel issues such as