PROGRAMME NOTE WRITTEN BY RACHEL KEEGAN FOR HATTON OPERATIC SOCIETY'S PRODUCTION OF "MY FAIR LADY" IN SEPTEMBER 1993

FROM "PYGMALION" TO "MY FAIR LADY"

It was in 1952 that the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was first approached by Gabriel Pascal, the producer of the film version of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion", with the idea that the play be converted into a musical. Lerner and the composer Fritz Loewe worked on the project for some six months before abandoning it as impossible. The rights had previously been offered to Rodgers & Hammerstein who had come to the same conclusion. Pascal died in 1954 and the appearance of his name in the obituary columns prompted Lerner to start thinking again about "Pygmalion". "My Fair Lady" opened in New York on 15 March 1956 with Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins, Julie Andrews as Eliza and Stanley Holloway as Doolittle. The rest is history.

After nearly forty years we have come to take "My Fair Lady" for granted with its elegant Ascot and Embassy Ball scenes and the cockney "knees up" in the Covent Garden scenes. One needs to study the script of "Pygmalion" in order to understand why its conversion into a musical was such a difficult task. The main problem was how to incorporate choruses and dances into what is essentially a drawing room comedy (another problem was the absence of any sub-plot to give musical contrast). Lerner wisely decided against introducing any secondary characters and retained as much as possible of Shaw's original dialogue, although not necessarily in the same locations (the scene at Ascot in which Eliza recounts how her aunt was 'done in' takes place in Mrs Higgins' drawing room in the play).

In order to accommodate minor characters, chorus and dancers, Lerner had to fill in the action which takes place between the acts of the play. For example, a brief scene in which Eliza meets her father and some of his friends in Tottenham Court Road was inserted between Acts I and II of the play. In "Pygmalion" Eliza's lessons are touched on only very briefly, whereas in "My Fair Lady", Lerner & Loewe provided three short scenes separated by musical interludes in which a small group of servants comment on the action in increasingly agitated close harmony and culminating in the triumphant tango "The Rain in Spain"

Several songs were discarded during the composition of the musical (although "Say a Prayer For Me Tonight", in which Eliza expressed her misgivings prior to the Ball, was later used in "Gigi") Freddy's song "On The Street Where You Live" was almost cut after a lukewarm reception at the out-of-town preview - it was retained at the last minute (with a new verse) and has gone on to become one of the most popular songs in the show (although our present Musical Director has commented that the lyric "All at once am I several storeys high" seems more appropriate to Manhattan than Edwardian London!). Higgins' songs were all specially written to accommodate Rex Harrison's unique "non-singing" vocal style and he was provided with a series of tape recordings to assist in the learning process (a practice which has become widespread in amateur operatic societies since the invention of the cassette recorder)

"Pygmalion" has an ambiguous ending - Higgins' last line is "Nonsense - she's going to marry Freddy. Ha ha ha!...."(in "My Fair Lady" this line comes halfway through the extended musical sequence at the end of the show). However to avoid any doubt Shaw added a prose epilogue in which he explains how Eliza did indeed marry Freddy. She achieved her ambition of opening a flower shop but had to endure considerable financial hardship because of Freddy's total lack of business sense. In spite of his newly-acquired wealth, Doolittle flatly refused to help them and Pickering had to come to the rescue on a number of occasions).

Mrs Patrick Campbell for whom Shaw wrote the play (and who incidentally was forty-nine years old when she played the part although Shaw states in his stage directions that Eliza is "perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older") refused to play the part as Shaw intended. At the end of the play, Higgins asks Eliza to stop off and buy him a pair of gloves, but she ignores his order and sweeps out. On the opening night however, Mrs Campbell returned to the stage and said "What size?"

Lerner included the following note in the libretto of "My Fair Lady":

I have omitted the sequel because in it Shaw explains how Eliza ends not with Higgins but with Freddy and - Shaw and Heaven forgive me! - I am not certain he is right

And so he has given us what is possibly the most memorable closing line in the whole of musical theatre:

"Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?"

© RACHEL KEEGAN 1993