Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh Dominic

Author:McHugh, Dominic [McHugh, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Life And Times Of My Fair Lady
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-06-07T20:00:00+00:00

HIGGINS’S CHARM, HIGGINS’S ARROGANCE

Higgins’s four solo songs also portray different aspects of his character. Yet his songs often seem more layered and ambiguous than hers, largely because he can be both charming and dislikeable at the same time. For instance, “An Ordinary Man” and “A Hymn to Him” are repulsively misogynistic but also have a charismatic element to them, perhaps because it is difficult to resist feeling amused by Higgins’s unquestioning faith in himself.33 His position is so extreme that we assume he cannot quite mean it. Loewe’s musical portrayal of Higgins inclines to the elegant, too, especially in contrast to the earthier music associated with Eliza’s fury or Doolittle’s drunkenness. Apparently, this complexity was hard to come by. For example, no song from the show underwent as much modification during the compositional period as “Why Can’t the English?” At least four distinct versions survive, offering us an unusual insight into Lerner and Loewe’s thought processes, for instance, the use of a “loose” form in the verse to convey Higgins’s message, the depiction of several key aspects of Higgins’s character, the use of stylistic gestures to suggest location and mood, and, finally, the way in which this was achieved with relative brevity.

It comes as no surprise to learn that the song was extensively rewritten. In The Street Where I Live, Lerner describes how Rex Harrison was not happy with the original version, because “he said he felt he sounded like an inferior Noël Coward.” Lerner put the problem down to the rhyme scheme.34 Harrison confirms the story and specifies that it was “too reminiscent of ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’; it needed breaking down and changing, it had a too familiar tang. Well, that song was worked on and worked on. Right through rehearsal Fritz was still playing with it.”35 The sources confirm this description of the composition period, but Lerner’s explanation of the modification of the rhyme scheme does not account for several intermediate versions; nor does he mention the musical changes alluded to by Harrison.

However, he expanded on the subject of the song in a letter to Harrison on November 29, 1955. After promising to “rewrite it completely in a way that will be not only simpatico with you, but with the character of Higgins,” he explained his general attitude to musical theater songs:

There are “song songs” and “character songs.” A “character song,” which is basically free and is accompanied by an emotion or emotions, as in the case in “I’m An Ordinary Man,” must pretty much stay within the bounds of reason. In a “song song,” certain extravagances are not only permissible, but desirable. “Why Can’t the English,” written as it was, was definitely a “song song” and therefore contained a certain amount of satiric extravagance. The minute the same idea is written in a freer way, so that it almost seems like normal conversation set to music, those extravagances would seem definitely out of place.36

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