Musical Mondays 18: My Fair Lady
You Did It!
“I’d be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling than to ever let a woman in my life.”
This is sung by a supposed expert in the English language. To be fair, he’s an expert phonetician, but that’s no excuse for singing “by rights she should be taken out and hung” when a real Englishman, expert or no, would know that “hung” rather than “hanged” is in itself “cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.”
Remember: ‘Pictures are hung. Men are, regrettably, sometimes hanged.’
What’s wrong with the first sentence of this post? Firstly, ‘equally as’ is tautology; “I’d be equally willing” is grammatically perfect and better style. If you protest that ‘as’ is logically followed by ‘than’, I simply say ‘I’d be equally as willing to eat chicken than fish’ and you may see the problem. There needs to be preference for ‘than’, e.g. ‘I’d rather eat chicken than fish.’ Higgins should be singing ‘I’d be equally willing for a dentist to be drilling as to ever let a woman in my life.’
Why does this annoy me so much? Because it’s careless and Lerner should have had more concern for the character. Frankly, I’m surprised that Rex Harrison, who was not known for considering the thoughts of others, didn’t complain. The story, which I hope is true, goes that Harrison brushed off a woman who’d been waiting outside the stage door; annoyed, she thwacked him with her playbill. ‘Ah,’ mused Stanley Holloway, ‘finally the fan hits the shit.’
Regular readers will know that I’m no musician, so it gave me great pleasure to read in Ethan Mordden that ‘I only know’ (in ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’) is marked tenuto in the first two choruses and a tempo in the third. According to Gene Lees, Lerner never liked the line “all at once my heart took flight” but never found a replacement. Of all the lines Lerner should have replaced, that isn’t one.
What it does suggest is the real stone in the show of MFL, which is to suggest that it’s really a May-to-December romance.1 I appreciate some tweaks had to be made for the translation to Broadway, but Gigi, which followed hard upon MFL, is a better example of a self-centred hedonist being woken to real humanity by a woman.
In my previous incarnation, the school production of My Fair Lady was superb. I learnt only later that the Head of Drama sniffily dismissed it as ‘sexist’, which is unworthy of an intelligent man (although may be partially explained by his habit of putting at least some of his A-level boys in drag). Funnily enough, he directed a school production of Legally Blonde, which my dear actor-singer-MD friend Michael pointed out was basically a re-boot of Pygmalion but without the intelligence or charm.2
One of the singularly most depressing experiences of that career was attending the Prep School performance (for American readers, ‘Prep School’ does not equate to Georgetown Prep: a preparatory school prepares students to enter school at age 13; ergo, the audience for this performance of MFL was 12-13yo). When Higgins said “why can’t a woman be more like a man?” there arose from the audience a mixture of gasps and nervous giggles, as though somebody had casually said fuck out loud. It was at this point that I realised there was little hope for the next generation and all the prep school teachers should be immediately fired.3 As with most of my good ideas, this never happened.
If you think that’s an over-reaction, try this thought experiment: what if Higgins had said ‘why can’t a man be more like a woman…?’
Although there’s a streak of casual sexism within Lerner, Pygmalion isn’t about sex relations per se; the sex relations are inevitable because all human relations are sexed relations. The point of the play is about society: as Lerner channelled Shaw, “an Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him / The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” Eliza is a creation, the work of an artist, but one who is adrift in any social stratum because her artificiality is not a socially-accepted form of artificiality (if you follow me). She is not protean; she has integrity; she has not been morally improved by the process. What Higgins gives her is reminiscent of another Shaw heroine, Major Barbara, who will take the ‘tainted’ money of the arms-maker because she can sanctify it. Higgins’ sin is not exactly sexism but broader inhumanity, the beautiful Shavian paradox being that Higgins, through that inhumanity, actually does “treat a duchess as if she were a flower-girl.” He is sufficiently wealthy and respected to be - relatively - free of social strictures; Doolittle is not. It’s all very interesting and with much greater depth, should one look for it, than most musicals.4
Two further points from Shaw’s published script of Pygmalion. Firstly, Higgins has never found a woman as interesting to him as his mother.5 Secondly, Shaw envisioned Eliza marrying Freddy and successfully managing both him and a flower-shop. The absence of the latter weakens MFL in comparison to its source, but it is definitely the case that Eliza, as a person, is closer to being Higgins’ equal than to being Freddy’s. But Higgins doesn’t understand that she’s a woman, which Freddy - for all his inadequacies - does.6 This was the circle Lerner attempted to square and I suppose that the last line of the play (“she’s going to marry Freddy!”) would have been a really odd way to end a musical. ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ is a truly innovative solution, the self-realisation demonstrating that the green shoots of humanity are beginning to sprout in Higgins’ bachelor soul.
In the aforementioned production I was AD-ing, it was coming along quite well but for one scene near the end, which was in danger of bringing the whole thing to a juddering halt. Eventually it occurred to me that Alex and Emily (not their real names) were almost doing too well; they were responding to each other, where the entire point of the scene was that Higgins and Eliza were talking past each other. They were reading two entirely different scripts; they weren’t communicating. And if the whole show isn’t about communication, what is it about?7
Okay, that’s a cheap line because all drama must be about communication to a greater or lesser extent. This does, however, remind me of Tom Lehrer’s timeless line about ‘modern’ literature: “I think if someone can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up.”
Higgins is no mere Svengali, interested in manipulating Eliza for his own purposes. Nonetheless, he is not (morally) worthy of her, she who really is a ‘good girl.’ He has given her the worldly necessities to liberate her innate qualities but she has not compromised her virtue. One could argue, without being too much of an awkward sod, that MFL is far more serious about women than, say, Cabaret.
Once Alex and Emily realised what was going on, the whole scene fizzed with mutual incomprehension. It was so good that the audience wanted to, as it were, yell at the screen. But it still left the big problem of MFL: how to justify Eliza’s return?
It appears to come from nowhere, especially as - most unlikely for a musical - Eliza has no indicative song. Therefore, if the script is any good, it must be explicable somehow. (Even if a script were rubbish, the actors have to make it convincing). The audience has to be able to say ‘oh… that does make sense.’ Lerner’s script isn’t rubbish, but the dénouement can feel like a deus ex machina on the level of lazy Shakespeare.
Recently I saw a meme that read ‘a man’s way of apologising is to say “are you feeling better?”’ Higgins is only beginning to change; this isn’t nonsense like As Good As It Gets. He’ll never become Pickering, he’ll always be overbearing and would trample on Eliza’s feelings if she let him. But he’s never going to apologise.
Emily, who was terrific, had to know why Eliza returned or else she would have betrayed her entire performance to that point. Alex had the easier task in that sense, but he has the line and to mess it up brings down the curtain on a flat note. (No pressure, then!) And one might criticise Lerner for piling so much on a single moment; that doesn’t happen in West Side Story or Guys and Dolls, for instance, in which the final scenes are natural conclusions.
Eliza returns because her character has developed sufficiently that she is able to live with Higgins without demeaning herself. Having moved through her Stockholm Syndrome-esque crush to see him as he is, with all his myriad faults, she can choose this life has her best option. He has given her that choice and, moreover, she can always change her mind. This is a form - nebulous, but still - of radical equality. His response to her appearance, “where the devil are my slippers?”, is the closest thing to an apology as he’s going to give. And Alex, to his eternal credit, delivered it well and the two held each other’s gaze as the curtain closed. Which, as they told me, felt like an eternity. But it worked.
Like all great works, My Fair Lady remains fresh and funny and, even in a school production, filled with edge-of-the-seat moments. If the hairs on your neck don’t stand up when Eliza correctly enunciates ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,” I advise you to check your pulse.
In Pygmalion, Higgins is only around 40. Rex Harrison slightly skewed our understanding of the age difference.
If we must play these games, I think Gigi is more dubious than MFL in that regard.
I knew this already for reasons I’ll tell you some other time, but which concern Natasha Devon.
Due acknowledgement to the torrents of pseudo-academic ordure that will have been written as ‘critical analysis’ of musical theatre but are really expressions of the authors’ own peculiar fixations.
Paging Dr Freud! or possibly Tennessee Williams.
Read (or re-read) Musical Mondays 1 for my highly intelligent analysis of ‘On The Street Where You Live.’
Would it be possible to write a decent Howard’s End musical? It covers much of the same ground, noting that Forster’s casual murder of the poor guy trying to improve his situation in life is more dismissive than Shaw.