(A sample chapter that I wrote for a planned book on the Broadway musical intended for Japanese publication. I hadn’t planned to release this in English, but here it is in slightly revised form.)

History of the Broadway Musical: My Fair Lady (1956)

Love is the universal theme of the traditional Broadway musical (and opera, for that matter). Regardless of the setting or characters or tone, the stories would invariably revolve around a pair of lovers and their travails, usually ending with the sweethearts blissfully reunited (musical) or dead (opera). Then came My Fair Lady.

The show was based on Pygmalion, a popular drama of 1912 by the prolific British playwright George Bernard Shaw about a famous professor of phonetics who takes in a grubby flower girl on a bet, claiming that he can pass her off as an upper-class lady. He trains her intensely for months, wins his wager, and then unceremoniously disposes of her. In Shaw’s conception, there is no suggestion of romantic love. Higgins finishes his experiment and shows no more interest in Eliza than when he started, irritated only that she thinks she is truly a lady rather than a flower girl dressed up as a lady.

Americans see the story as the American dream: Eliza studies hard and overcomes many obstacles to realize her goals. In fact, it is not a story about opportunity but about the lack of opportunity. In England’s strict class system at the time, Eliza was born a flower girl and would die a flower girl, regardless of her education or efforts. And that was Shaw’s point. An avowed socialist, he felt that the deck was stacked against a large segment of society. He intensely disliked the idea of a romance between Eliza and Higgins, feeling that once she had won her independence from the professor, it would be pointless for her to go back. Indeed, it would defeat the whole purpose of the play: if women are endowed with education, breeding and a mind of their own, they can be a positive force for society, he believed, not a simple object belonging to their husbands. He said his point was “the escape of Eliza from the tyranny of Higgins”, who he called a “middle-aged…bachelor with a mother-fixation”.

But he fought a losing battle. The audience was clearly in love with Eliza and wanted her to have a happy ending. In the original production, Shaw’s own actors, to his fury, threw in increasing hints of such an ending as the run progressed*, and the producers of the 1938 movie, which he himself scripted (he won an Oscar), changed the ending without his permission to show the former flower girl returning to her teacher. Shaw rewrote the play several times to remove any ambiguity, and wrote a note in the published text suggesting that Eliza married Freddy. He abjectly refused to give the rights for a musical version, where he feared such an ending would be inevitable. He threatened to sue Franz Lehar, creator of the global blockbuster The Merry Widow, when he learned the composer was working on an operetta version.

Still, the popularity of the show made it an inevitable musical target. Once Shaw died in 1950, the rights holder immediately tried many parties, from reigning theatrical giants Rodgers & Hammerstein (Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King & I) to comedy writers Comden & Green (Singin’ in the Rain, On the Town), but no one could get an angle on it. The long-established pattern in Broadway musicals was to have a romantic leading couple and a comic secondary couple. Pygmalion not only lacked the latter – it didn’t even have the former.** This was not a love story, the usual musical fare, but a serious critique of British society. In addition, it had no place for big production numbers, considered a must for musicals.

The project eventually came to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. The pair had teamed up nearly a decade earlier for the delightful Scottish fantasy Brigadoon (a Takarazuka hit in the 1970s) as well as the interesting Gold Rush story Paint Your Wagon in 1951, and Lerner had written scripts for several major films, winning an Oscar for An American in Paris. Still, they were not the typical Broadway musical types: Lerner had attended upper-class English boarding schools and Harvard, where he was JFK’s classmate and close friend; Loewe was a classically trained immigrant from Berlin (he was the youngest-ever piano soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic) and son of a famous Viennese operetta star. But then again, this was not the typical Broadway fare.

Lerner, responsible for both book and lyrics, initially struggled with the material. The play is structured as a drawing room comedy, a very limiting prospect for musical treatment. He thought about shifting the action to Oxford and making Higgins a university professor, which would allow him to open up the action. But he failed to make that work.

The problem, he said, was that this was a “non-love story”, noting, “How, may I ask, does one write a non-love song?” Like everyone else, he tried mightily to bring out the romance. In one of his early song drafts, he has Eliza sing, “Say a prayer that he’ll discover / I’m his lover / For now and evermore.” But that felt too emphatic. The characters themselves don’t realize that they are in love, and outright love songs risked turning the show into operetta.***

The songwriters composed a few numbers and played them for Mary Martin, one of Broadway’s biggest stars. She turned them done flatly, lamenting that “the poor boys have lost their talent”. That deeply hurt Lerner, who was so shaken that he initially gave up the project. (Martin has the distinction of turning down the lead in three shows – Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady and Hello, Dolly! – that successively broke the record for Broadway’s longest-running musical.)

After a two-year blank, Lerner had an epiphany: the play was fine just as it is. There was no need to switch the setting, create a romance or find a big dance number; what needed to change was the conventions of the traditional musical. The motivations for all characters were drawn sharply and strongly enough to propel the action, and the underlying emotions could take care of themselves, as the original play amply showed. Lerner kept a notable portion of the dialogue from the play, incorporating the words in many cases directly into the lyrics. His main work, he recalled, was to fill in the spaces “between the acts”, i.e., presenting the scenes that happened offstage in the original play. He was even able to create production numbers by shifting a tea party scene to the elite Ascot race track and adding scenes for Eliza’s father. The British humor and characterizations were atypical for Broadway musicals, but with the English-educated Lerner and the European-born Loewe, the show had found its perfect writers.

One of the biggest problems was how to musicalize Henry Higgins, the irascible academic. This is not a character who waxes poetic; for all his love of language, he is blunt and self-centered, and the risk was that music would sentimentalize him. The songwriters’ ingenious solution was to employ a kind of song-speak, where Higgins’ songs are virtually an outgrowth of the dialogue. At first, Lerner incorporated clever rhymes for comic effect, but came to realize that this was artificial. The resulting lyrics are straightforward and the rhyme schemes simple, coming off less as songs than musings. Their lead actor, Rex Harrison, a stage and screen star, was actually not a bad singer; his vocal coach Peter Howard recalled being hired to teach Harrison “how not to sing”. Musically speaking, it is the character, not the actor, that is unable to sing, and the composer’s brilliant musical treatment gave that character a voice.

Loewe ensured that the music throughout the show grew organically from the setting and characters. That is particularly evident with Eliza’s character development. The actress playing this demanding role must go from an uneducated flower girl (aged 18, in Shaw’s script) to a society woman who is mistaken at one point for a princess. The difference between her cockney “Just You Wait” in Act I and elegant “Without You” in Act II, for example, lies not just in her word choice but in the very sound that she uses to express them. Both show her inner fire but in distinctive ways that reflect her maturation over the course of the show. Also, it is only after her pronunciation breakthrough that her voice truly soars in “I Could Have Danced All Night”, symbolizing her first step from flower girl to lady. Her musicalization alone is a lesson in great writing.

Similarly, her dustman father sings in rollicking English music hall style, underlining his working class roots, while the scene with the upper class audience at the Ascot races is performed as a graceful gavotte. Loewe’s musical palette here was thoroughly steeped in an English sound that grounded the show in a specific time and place. Perhaps Loewe’s European roots made him more sensitive to the needs of the non-American setting, though England would have been equally foreign to him. In any event, the score’s pitch-perfect representation of character and setting is one of the supreme musical achievements of the Broadway stage.

Music is also used to reinforce the relationship between the main two characters. Note that Professor Higgins and Eliza have no duets. They sing together only with Higgins’ friend Pickering in the joyous “The Rain In Spain” after Eliza has finally made her breakthrough. Toward the end of the show, they appear together in “Without You”, when Eliza tells Higgins she is leaving him, but this is hardly a duet – Higgins listens silently and, once she is through, sings a brief variation of the earlier “You Did It”. Once she has gone, Higgins’ next number clearly shows his feelings for his former pupil but only in an oblique way: he has “grown accustomed to her face” (a phrase taken directly from Shaw’s text). He cannot even admit to himself that he is in love; we understand his emotions better than he does. When Eliza then returns, the writers must have been tempted to have Higgins rush to embrace her – indeed, the stage directions say, “If he could but let himself, he would run to her” – but they wisely do the opposite. That is, he keeps his emotions in check, sits and, without even looking at Eliza, asks her to fetch his slippers. The stage directions state, “There are tears in Eliza’s eyes. She understands.” And so do we.

The show is not perfect. For one thing, Higgins makes several grammatical errors, hardly forgivable for a language expert. In the very opening song, Higgins sings, “She should be taken out and hung / For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue”. As Japanese students know, the past tense of “hang” in this case is not “hung” (物を吊るした、掛けた) but “hanged” (絞首刑にした). Lerner lazily used the wrong word in order to rhyme with “tongue”, and was embarrassed when the famed songwriter Noel Coward approached him on opening night and rapped him for his error. In another case, Higgins sings “than to ever let a woman in my life” rather than the correct “as to ever”.

The song “On The Street Where You Live” (an Americanism – the British would say “in the street”) features a more serious error. While the rest of the score is in meticulous English style, this song is a typical 1950s Broadway sound and thus completely out of place in musical terms. It gives the impression that the composers basically wanted a hit song, which certainly succeeded – this is still one the show’s biggest sellers. However, it is jarring in context given how perfectly the rest of the music matches the setting. It is a curious lapse considering the lavish care taken elsewhere, though audiences and record buyers do not seem to mind.

It is worth remembering the uniqueness of the show when it appeared. Lerner broke all the rules for a Broadway musical: in addition to the odd “non-love story”, the show had a talky and highly literate book with large chunks of dialogue taken directly from Shaw’s cerebral play, a realistic British setting with no Americans at all, a wry British sense of humor, and an all-British cast in the leading roles, including a relatively unknown actress named Julie Andrews in the key part of Eliza. It also revolved around the British obsession with class, which does not often translate well for Americans, who care less about background than money. American writers would usually rather set shows in exotic settings like Bangkok (The King & I), Baghdad (Kismet) or Salzburg (The Sound of Music) – even Kanagawa (Pacific Overtures) – than in the UK, where the dialogue requires a particular style of English that Americans find hard to handle. British-made musicals themselves were extremely rare on Broadway at the time – only two were produced in the entire 1950s, including a fanciful import called The Boy Friend the year before with newcomer Julie Andrews.

Nevertheless, the show was a blockbuster success: on stage, in record-breaking runs both in New York and London; on film, where it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Film; and on record, where the original cast recording was America’s biggest-selling album of the year, remaining fifteen weeks at #1 and an astounding 480 weeks on the Billboard 200, still the third-longest run for an album of any genre. It was also a critical triumph, recognized immediately as a classic (the New York Times hailed it as “one of the best musicals of the century”). It is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style Golden Age musicals. Lerner not only achieved a romantic story without a single kiss, he managed to maintain the essence of Shaw’s social criticism within a musical framework.

Interestingly for a show that is so concerned with the English language, My Fair Lady has been an extremely popular title worldwide, propelled especially by the success of the movie. It has been recorded in many languages from Spanish to Hebrew. It is of course a landmark in Japan, where the Tokyo production in 1963 starring 江利チエミ and 高島忠夫became the first Japanese-language version of a Broadway musical. Its tremendous success sparked an entire musical theater boom that continues to this day. I was surprised to read an interview with the director of a recent Japanese production stating that the main point of the show is a young woman’s need for love. I would have thought that the social criticism implicit in the show would have been clearer for Japan, where the class structure in the past was similar in many ways to the UK, also an island nation.

None of the first three Broadway revivals in the decades since had significant runs, suggesting that tastes had changed, at least in the US. Perhaps attention spans are too short for the demanding dialogue and lyrics, or maybe the world of Edwardian London caught so vividly in the script (and still within living memory in 1956) is too far from present-day experience.* That said, the fourth revival in 2018 was well received, though the ending was changed to remove the romance between the leads, ironically bringing it closer to Shaw’s conception. It has had more success in London, where the legendary producer Cameron Mackintosh (Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera), who calls it “the perfect musical”, has produced it twice – his 2001 production ran for two years – and was at one point planning a new film version. The show’s popularity in Japan, of course, has never flagged.

In any case, its position in the musical canon remains secure. Few musicals have ever captured an era and sensibility as richly, and nowhere are all the pieces of a show in such ideal balance. It tells its “non-love story” with exemplary style, wit and feeling. It is ironic that it took an American team to produce the perfect British musical, and that a British-themed show is the ideal American musical. Shaw would have approved.

* In the final scene of the text, Higgins commands Eliza to go buy him a pair of gloves, at which she snaps, “Buy them yourself” and leaves angrily. Higgins laughs and the curtains close. On opening night, however, Shaw was astonished as the lead actress returned and asked, “What size?” When Shaw returned for the 100th performance, he was infuriated to find Higgins tossing a bouquet to Eliza from the balcony. The actor playing Higgins reportedly told Shaw, “My ending makes money; you ought to be grateful,” to which Shaw retorted, “You ought to be shot.”

** It should be noted that The King & I had featured a non-romantic relationship between its leading characters, a British woman and a Thai king, five years earlier. But that show had a much more typical structure, including a secondary love affair, numerous choral numbers, and an unmistakable sexual attraction between the two leads highlighted in the number “Shall We Dance?” My Fair Lady was far more daring in its approach.

*** Other proposed lines include: “Pray that he’s lonely, a ship lost at sea / Searching for someone exactly like me.” “If I were a work of art / Would I wake his sleeping heart?” The lovely number, “Say a Prayer For Me Tonight”, was cut, but it wasn’t wasted; it found its way in slightly revised form into the team’s next work, the Oscar-winning film Gigi.

*Britain was a popular setting on Broadway in the immediate post-Lady years in British shows such as Oliver! and Half a Sixpence. But note that few of the British mega-hits since the 1970s have actually been set in that country – Jesus Christ Superstar (Jerusalem), Evita (Buenos Aires), Cats (fantasy), Les Miserables and Phantom (both Paris), Miss Saigon (Saigon), Sunset Boulevard (Los Angeles) and so forth. Mary Poppins, the one big exception, was half-produced by Disney and drawn largely from the Disney film.