>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.  

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>> Catlin Miller:  Good evening everybody.  Hello.  Welcome.  My name is Cate Miller and I am a reference specialist in the music division here at the Library of Congress and I'm also the American Musicological Society liaison for the Music Division.  I'm so happy to welcome you all here for the fall 2016 installment of the American Musicological Society and Library of Congress Lecture Series.  Twice a year, we present lectures that feature AMS members who conducted research in the music division' collections, but the series is also meant to inspire scholars who have not yet found the opportunity to explore everything that has to offer and that is why we are recording the lecture tonight.  Tonight's presenter, Dr. Dominic McHugh is a good friend of the Music Division.  In fact, I just learned earlier today that it in fact 10 years ago this very week that he first came to the library to start his research here.  So for a decade now we have welcomed him to the Performing Arts Reading Room downstairs and I know that on his most recent trips he's proven an invaluable consultant as we completed processing our Alan J. Lerner collection and his expertise will capture you all tonight as he enlightens us on the creative partnership of Lerner and Loewe and specifically as we look at "My Fair Lady."  The Music Division is home to the Alan J. Lerner collection, the Frederick Loewe collection and many other significant musical theater collections that document the history of the show.  You can find more information about our special collections by visiting the Performing Arts Reading Room website or by contacting me or one of my other fabulous colleagues in the Reference section at the Music Division.  You can do that by finding the "Ask a Librarian" link on the library's website.  They make it very easy and you can find it at the top of nearly every page on the site.  There are two things I want to point out tonight before we get started.  One is that Dr. McHugh has written two books that are available tonight for you for purchase.  One, "Loverly; The Life and Times of My Fair Lady" and "Alan J. Lerner; A Lyricist's Letters."  Both of these are available at the table right over on the side of the room there and they're being sold at a discount price from the publisher price.  So keep that in mind if you are eager for more after tonight's talk and you just haven't had enough, go directly to the table right afterwards.  The other thing I wanted to point out for those of you who maybe came in just a minute or two before we got started is that our musical theater specialist, Mark Horowitz put together a wonderful display over here of collection materials related to "My Fair Lady."  So, also check that out on your way out if you didn't get a chance to already.  Okay, so over the past 9 years we've had the privilege of hearing from 17 notable scholars and one of whom is here tonight.  In 2009, Dr. Walter Frisch of Columbia University presented to us on Arnold Schoenberg's creative journey 1897 to 1912 and I'm happy he's here tonight and I'd like to now welcome him back to the podium to offer greetings from the American Musicological Society.  

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>> Walter Frisch:  Thank you Cate.  Some of what I'm about to say she's already said so I'll cut it short.  To welcome you, I'd like to welcome you to the 18th lecture in the series cosponsored by the American Musicological Society and the Library of Congress and as you've heard these lectures have been given by scholars who have conducted research here in the Music Division.  And as you also just heard I had the honor to give a lecture here in this series in 2009 and I'm especially pleased to be asked back on behalf of the American Musicological Society to welcome you and to introduce tonight's speaker who as you've also heard is Professor Dominic McHugh speaking on quote it's about the title, "In the Workshop of Lerner and Loewe; Archival Sources for the Genesis of My Fair Lady."  And you probably also have information on him on your program, so I will be brief so we can get to the main act, Act III. Dominic is a senior lecture in musicology and director of performance at the University of Sheffield and is the author of the two books that you just saw by Oxford University Press.  He received all of degrees from King's College London including his doctorate and in addition to his scholarly publications which include publications in many journals and collections in addition to the books, Professor McHugh has been active on both sides of the Atlantic giving pre-performance lectures.  He's also appeared on radio and television and he served as the consultant for a wide range of musical theater events. This is what we now call public musicology at this its best.  Dominic is real wonderful spokesman and representative of what, at least what the AMS is now calling and promoting as public musicology.  He also recently worked with the Sidney Opera House on their reconstruction of the original production of "My Fair Lady" directed by Dame Julie Andrews; pretty exciting.  I danced all night when he told me that and I wasn't even there.  His forthcoming projects include a book length study of the Broadway composer Meredith Willson. "The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theater Adaptations" in addition of the complete lyrics of Alan J. Lerner with Amy Ash and documented biographies of Frank Lesser and Cole Porter with the scholar Cliff Eisen, many activities.  It's clear from what I've already said that Professor McHugh is one of the most active and productive scholars of musical theater today.  Some 40 years ago when I began in musicology, there was virtually no scholarship on musical theater which was considered not appropriate for a serious research sort of beneath the attention of scholars.  Now that situation has obviously changed in the large part thanks to researchers like Professor McHugh whose work is a testament not only to the great interest in but also the highest scholarly standards that are being applied and can be applied to the study of musical theater.  It's a very exciting era that we are now in.  And I can personally say that it is a thrill for me to be able to hear tonight's lecture about a work that I have always adored.  I grew up in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, a golden age of American musicals.  My parents and grandparents often took me and my; my sister and me to hear the latest shows. Well I was just a bit too young to have heard the original cast of "My Fair Lady" , actually I was looking at the programs here, I think I might had heard like you know the third program there with the people who succeeded Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison.  Nonetheless, I did get to hear the original cast of Lerner and Loewe's "Camelot" with Julie Andrews, Richard Burton, Robert Goulet and Rodney McDowell.  It was really an unforgettable experience that makes the kind of work Professor McHugh is doing especially gratifying.  And if you'd like to interview me Dominic about my experiences and reactions even though I was only 10, I'm happy to be part of your next project on Lerner and Loewe.  But now in case you're wondering if ever I will leave you, I will to yield the stage here to Professor Dominic McHugh who I hope you welcome warmly.

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>> Dominic McHugh:  Thank you Cate and Walter for those very warm introductions and thank you everyone for coming.  It's such a joy to be back at my beloved Library of Congress to talk about my favorite musical and as I've been working here all week and once again I've been marveling at the wealth of the musical theater collections, the Music Division houses the papers of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, through Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Sondheim, Bernstein and even more recent figures like Marvin Hamlisch and Jonathon Larson who wrote "Rent", so it's a privilege to be able to come and undertake research here and we're also lucky that staff in the Music Division are so committed and passionate about the library's mission to preserve this precious repertoire for prosperity.  After all, the history of the Broadway musical is also the history of America in the 20th century and no art form has been more reflective of the country's social and political struggles.  Nevertheless, I feel quite strongly that we in musicology continue to fail the library's work in a way by not using the collections nearly enough.  The commitment of the library's extraordinary staff both past and present over the last few decades has enabled all this wonderful material to be collected here for the benefit of everyone, but it's our job as scholars to take it to the people, take it from the library to the people and it truly astounds me how much amazing stuff has yet to be properly examined and written about.  There's so much work to be done and I'm full of admiration for the AMS for providing this regular forum for bringing these collections to wider attention at a time when sometimes reception studies can occasionally overwhelm musicology. It's quite enlightened the society to make possible the series of lectures about sources and documentary studies.  It's also fantastic that they're being filmed not that I'm particularly happy for the audience at home to be confronted by me on YouTube, but it's fantastic they're being filmed because it does allow us to bring this work to the attention of the wider public and perhaps more importantly, it helps us to show students all over the world what kinds of things we can learn from the archives of this stature and importance.  It's such an honor and a privilege to have been invited to take part and I only hope I can do the AMS and the library justice. And before I may run through "My Fair Lady" I also wanted to extend a warm welcome to my family, my poor parents who made possible that first trip to the library 10 years ago when I was accompanied by my mother and my father phone anxiously every say, so it's wonderful they can be here.  And a particular warm thanks to Emily Altman, President of the Frederick Loewe Foundation whose mother Floria Lasky was Frederick Loewe's lawyer for the bulk of his career so it's very exciting now that Emily has taken over and facilitated all kinds of exciting things already, so I'm overjoyed she can be here to celebrate Loewe's work at the home of his manuscripts.  So, on to "My Fair Lady."  When "My Fair Lady" commenced its record-breaking run of 2717 performances on the 15th of March 1956, the impact it had was almost unprecedented.  Rarely before had a musical created such cultural impact on Broadway less alone within the theater scene.  And such was the overwhelming charm, elegance and sophistication of the music book and lyrics that the phrase, "It's not My Fair Lady" became standard in theatrical parlance indicating the degree to which this piece became the benchmark against which musicals would be judged well into the future. One thing that interests me though is the impact of the musical at the time it was first seen and when it was fresh and new and nobody was really expecting it, and the following brilliant letter from the Grouch Marx collection here at the library; from Groucho to the producer of "My Fair Lady" have Herman Levin humorously reveals how much talk the show had inspired just 6 weeks after it's opening.  He wrote, "Dear Herman, I received your letter and the generosity that was enclosed by this I mean the seats for the performance of May the 21st" and he's talking about "My Fair Lady."   And he said, "The news of the success of your show has trickled all the way to California. As a matter of fact, it's become one of the chief topics conversation in some homes it has even replaced sex.  Mine happens to be one of them."  [Brief laughter]  Poor Groucho's comments neatly summarize the extent to which "My Fair Lady" captured the public's attention and not merely at the latest diversion but it's something of unusual excellence and his sentiments are reflected in the following message from the great movie star Fred Astaire to the musical's lyricist Alan J. Lerner. He writes, "Dear Alan, it's simply the best show that has ever been produced as you well know. The writing is great and my Ava", which was his daughter, "and I were enthralled to say the least.  Those lyrics are really something and that music, I was crazy about all of the cast and of course carried away by Rex H. and Miss Andrews.  What a treat!" and so on.  Another of the musical fans indeed perhaps the most important was none other than Cole Porter.  In a letter to Moss Hart held I'm afraid in Moss Hart's papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society and not the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.  Porter wrote, "Thank you so much not only for the seats but for giving me a chance to see the best direction of a musical that I have ever known in my life."  And Porter became absolutely obsessed with the show and started communicating with Alan J. Lerner the lyrist of the show about it.  And they had dinner together and you can see this letter here on the screen; Lerner writes to him and says, "Dear Cole, I enjoyed seeing you so very much the other night.  Your enthusiasm for the show means more to me than I can possibly say.  I am naturally always pleased when people like it, but especially so when some do and I can't think of anybody to whom that applies more than to you.  I'll have your seats for you in the fall and I do hope we'll be able to have an evening together while you're here."  And in the postscript is lovely, it says "Crest Toothpaste is dazzling.  I bought a tube the next morning.  Best thing since French pastry." And the meaning of this reference to "seats in the fall: becomes apparent in the following letter from Porter and back to Lerner in which he says, "My 'subscription' seats for My Fair Lady arrived and I can't tell you how deeply I appreciate it."  And basically what happened was Porter went to see the show every Wednesday night or had this pair of tickets set aside for him every Wednesday night because that's how much he loved it. So you can see that even someone of his stature and experience at the very end of his career was absolutely enthralled by it.  But then people started to feel differently and so because of the show's success, people started to lampoon it.  So with a month of the show's opening and success, people started to create parody versions, some of which you can see on the screens here.  So for instance My Fur Lady contains some called Teach me how to think Canadian and the show had an 18 month tour of Canada and My Square Laddie was a kind of studio album so it was never staged and it basically reversed the situation so it's about a Brooklyn woman who teaches an English professor how to speak with a Brooklyn accent and the songs include things like the Block Where you Rock instead of the Street Where you Live.  And there's a solo called I Could Have Boozed All Night, and You Did It became I Got To Hand IT To You.  Allan Sherman created a spoof version that was actually called My Fair Lady and it used Loewe's music without permission set to new words and the song titles include, With a Little Bit of Locks, I Got the Customer's to Face, my own favorite, Get Me to the Temple on Time.  Meanwhile, my Fairfax Lady ran for several years on Las Angeles and included songs such as, why can't the Yankees teach their children how to speak?  And on the street where you eat which contained lines such as indigestion comes so I carry Tums knowing I am on the street where you eat. So you can see that within the first couple of years after it's opening, it went form this dazzling success into all this kind of strange territory and I found by the early 1960s, attitudes towards it had started to change.  So in this column from the New York Times from October in 1961 describing a concert to be given by the French actor Yves Montand it contains the comment; 'Mr. Montand is going to do a bit of showing off during his stand.  He will sing "I've Grown Accustomed to her Face" from Alan Lerner's and Frederick Loewe's "You Know What".'  Although playful, the comment "you know what" also implies some kind of "My Fair Lady" fatigue might have set in, as in everyone is expecting these songs all the time and it's something that had been anticipated by Moss Hart who directed the original Broadway production and is often credited with sort of masterminding it and within months of world's premiere of the show, he wrote an article which I believe was never published.  I've not been able to find this out called "The Hazards of the Profession."  

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And it begins like this; "Ladies and gentlemen it's no secret that one of the hazards of the theatrical profession is the necessity at having a hit, but like everything else in the theater there are hazards to having a hit too. For the actors trapped in the prison light sentence of a long run.  Strong measures are sometimes need to keep them fresh and on their toes." And he goes on to describe a matinee performance of "My Fair Lady" in July 1970, so he's casting his imagination into the future.  It was probably written about 1957, so he's been king, in 13 years-time it's still going to playing.  So let's look at matinee performance in 1970 and see how Mr. Rex Harrison and Miss Julie Andrews are bearing up under the string of a long run.  He focuses on the "Rain in Spain" and writes, "Eliza seems to summon up every remaining ounce energy in your body and then she speaks.  The "Rain in Spain" stays mainly in the plain, nothing happens.  She turns slowly toward the figure of Professor Higgins slumped in the chair and waits.  From the wings, a long pole with a large glistening steel spike at the end of it comes out and jabs Professor Higgins in the flank. Higgins leaps in the air with a streak of pain and says, by George she's got it. Higgins and Eliza [inaudible] proceed into the dance which is in agony for all of their aging bones and by the end of it collapse in the first stages of a heart attack on the sofa.  Mrs. Pearce and the two servants appear each with a tank of oxygen plainly labeled and proceed to insert a tube in each of their mouths slowly inhaling deeply from the tanks they manage to sit up."  Hart then describes how Eliza sings the first the reframe of "I could have danced all night" sitting on the armchair and then accidentally go to sleep.  But the management knows the danger spots by now and has arranged things accordingly.  The armchair has been wired almost like the electric chair and there is now a great buzzing and electric sparks fly out from all over the chair.  Eliza is catapulted out of the chair like a rocket and immediately goes into the second chorus.  Finally, finally Mrs. Pierce and the servants bring out huge bottles of smelling salts to Eliza get through the third reframe and just as she's swaying through the final bars, a stage manager sneaks out in the darkness a long hose trailing behind him in the wings and as she comes to the final half of the final chorus, they begin to hose her down with ice cold water until the curtains massively close." So I'm not quite sure when Hart wrote this little sketch but the references to Harrison and Andrews suggest it must have been during the first year or so of the original Broadway run and what's interesting is that he could already anticipate that the magic and inspires so many people initially could easily turn into a caricature and almost 40 years later Eliza and Higgins did eventually become plastic when they were depicted as Barbie and Ken.  Now my 'My Fair Lady" range featured Barbie as Eliza in five different costumes from the movie and even worse, Ken as a rather tan Henry Higgins.  This moment in the reception history of the musical provides a new spin on Mrs. Higgins' line, "You certainly are a pretty pair of babies playing with your live doll."  Of course we shouldn't over read something as natural as the commercialization of a musical that was after all written to make money.  But it's fascinating how far the work had traveled from those early weeks when Groucho Marx and Fred Astaire where over awed by it through to these brainless depictions of two of the most intelligent [inaudible] characters in the history of musical theater.  Once Eliza and Higgins had become Barbie and Ken we've come a long way from Lerner and Loewe's "My Fair Lady."  When embarked on my research into "My Fair Lady" 10 years ago this month, I began by considering the reviews in the early history of the show and I was struck by comments such as Brooks Atkinson's review in the New York Times in which he praised the work of Lerner and Loewe but made this comment, 'Shaw's crackling mind is still the genius of "My Fair Lady".'  Although this direct something of the sentiment is also inherent in Al Hirschfeld's celebrated poster design for the show in which George Bernard Shaw is depicted as pulling the strings of Eliza and Higgins from heaven while Lerner and Loewe are nowhere to be seen.  So this motivated two questions; what happened with "My Fair Lady" before all of the reception history that I've described? What was it like when it was fresh?  And particularly what was Lerner and Loewe's contribution to "My Fair Lady"?  There had been numerous attempts to turn "Pygmalion" into a musical or operetta during Shaw's lifetime but he always said no, partly because in 1908 Oscar Straus wrote an operetta called the "The Chocolate Soldier" based on Shaw's "Arms and the Man" and result of this was the "The Chocolate Soldier" became so popular that no one wanted to do "Arms in the Man" anymore and so part of Shaw's income and was diminished. And so he said no to everyone that wanted to do similar projects, but after his death in 1950, a musical "Pygmalion" finally seemed possible.  And Rodgers and Hammerstein spent much of 1950 trying to do it, but gave up and then the Theater Guild who produced "Oklahoma" and 'Carousel" on Broadway were looking for another musical to turn into a hit.  And with that their previous shows, they tended to turn to successful plays and as the basis for musicals rather than creating new stories and so they were very happy to join forces with Gabriel Pascal who was the Hungarian film producer of a movie version of "Pygmalion" and he now held the rights to turn it into a musical. This letter from the Theater Guild's papers reveals that while you might now the benefits of hindsight think of Lerner and Loewe as the obvious team to write the show, they were actually quite a long way down the list.  After Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter had turned down the project, this list was drawn up and we can see that four names appear above Loewe's which is amusingly misspelled.  Perhaps it's not surprising that the veteran Irving Berlin should be at the top of the list because he had written things like "Annie Get Your Gun" and "Call Me Madam" in fairly recent years and he was just the hero of Broadway in many ways along with Cole Porter.  And Frank Loesser's position on the list was secured because of the success of "Guys and Dolls" in 1950, but it astonishing really to think that Menotti's name is there at number three way above Lerner and Loewe not to mention Howard Rome who in 2016 is now an almost forgotten and obscure name in the history of Broadway, so it's amazing that at this point he was perceived to be a more viable choice.  But Lerner and Loewe were so far down the list also reminds us of the degree to which "My Fair Lady" how to fix their identity, reputation and legacy.  Nothing written before elevated them above the rest of these names and of course they would never again enjoy quite the same success.  Between the 15th of February 1952 and the 20th of March, the first four names were approached with "Pygmalion" and turned it down and then it was the turn of Lerner and Loewe who had actually just signed on to write a musical version of "Casablanca" so they quickly abandoned this when "Pygmalion" popped up.  And by the 10th of May, Lerner had already started to work on the adaptation and he quickly realized that extensive changes were needed to Shaw's text in order to make it work as a musical.  For instance, in this letter to Pascal he noted; "That as far as the conversion to musical form is concerned, there are two basic problems.  The first is to get it out of the drawing room and into the open and the second is to tighten the story" and he continued.  "In the first instance of getting it out of the drawing room, Fritz and I have several ideas.  The scene in Mrs. Higgins's home for example, the gin to her was mother's milk scene could be played at the opening of Ascot.  It could be extremely colorful and lend itself to great humor both musically and otherwise.  The calmness of the British aristocracy at the races I always thought very funny."  So we can see that one of the key points of Lerner's adaptation which was moving the intimate domestic tea party from Mrs. Higgins's house to Ascot was well in place within six weeks of taking on the project.  He also realized that the 1938 movie adaptation of "Pygmalion" contained a number of useful ideas that could be employed for the musical adaptation. So he says, "Now, of course, following the motion picture, there are the ball scenes and the wonderfully touching sequence when Eliza returns to Convent Garden and nobody recognizes her.  A scene like that could be developed so that the second scene that Mrs. Higgins's when the professor finds her after a long search could be obviated." We can also see from this that not all of his initial ideas came to parts and the second scene that Mrs. Higgins's house remained in the show.  Another example of this is in the following comment when he says that "The end of act I, of course, can be one of the great moments of any musical I can remember.  It should be Eliza's preparation for the ball, her excitement, her desire to please the professor, her dressing, her rehearsing, her manners, musically it should be one her big, big numbers ending with her going off with the professor for the great and final test.  It could be really wonderful don't you think?  Later on we'll see how Lerner's prediction, Eliza's preparation for the ball would be the highlight of the musical would turn out to be absolutely wrong.  And the other interesting thing about this letter, is Lerner's initial ideas about casting, Lerner goes on extensively about the notion of having Mary Martin who was the star of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific" amongst various other things, playing Eliza.  So he says, "No matter how excited I get about the play, I always stop when I come to the question, can we get Mary Martin?"   

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"Although, there are undoubtedly others who could play it, I do feel anybody after Mary is second choice.  Liza is one of the great parts for a woman ever written.  In music, it will be even greater and Mary obviously the greatest star the musical theater has produced.  There's no doubt about that."  And he continued to gush about her in the letter as follows; "Sometimes it seems like a perfect marriage.  It doesn't bother me at all that's she's American because if the King's English is taught to her by the professor doesn't seem completely compatible with her, neither was it with Eliza in the play.  And the Cockney she can do easily.  From a show business point of view, it will be a great tour [inaudible]." Then to, Mary is the only one I know who has naturally that odd combination of the little girl and the great lady. I can't think of another part where both these qualities could be better employed, or on the other side, when Mary could run more of a gamut of all her talents, this is one play that should be written for her and with her."  And he caps off the letter with this final comment, "I know it's a superb property, but at the moment I'm stuck with Mary Martin in my head and in my heart.  I'm ready to do anything short of homicide to see Mary as Liza." And what's surprising about this letter is that many years later in his memoirs, Lerner would rewrite history on this topic and he claimed that in 1954 he received a phone call from Mary Martin's husband who said that he and Mary had read that we were doing "Pygmalion" and that they would love to hear what had written.  "Mary Martin as Eliza Doolittle?  Mary had no greater admirer than Fritz and I, but did not seem shall we say, 'a natural'," So he implies the opposite of what was the case and in fact Mary Martin turned down the role of Eliza but not before she had teased the Theater Guild and Lerner and Loewe with a series of demands for that potential production, including having Rex Harrison as Higgins, it was her idea not theirs and Cecil Beaton as designer. And when she eventually turned it down, the Theater Guild approached Delores Gray another Broadway star and even went to the trouble of staging "Pygmalion" with Delores Gray as Eliza so that Lerner and Loewe could see how she might be in the role. They also considered people like Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland which seemed like extraordinary ideas now, but bearing in mind that hardly anything had been written at this stage and they could have crafted it around those people.  By October 1952, Lerner and Loewe had lost faith in the project. They couldn't find a way to make the adaptation and they also dissolved their partnership.  I haven't found any concrete evidence of why, but they had arguments at various points in their lives and it seems like this was one of their points.  And then in the summer of 1954, Lerner's wife at the time brought him back with Loewe. They had lunch together and by the end of lunch they sort of discussed "Pygmalion" again and found their old enthusiasm and 18 months later, "My Fair Lady" went into rehearsal in New York.  When Lerner and Loewe finally got to work, they would begin by mapping out the synopsis of the show in order to find song moments, places where songs and dances should g and this one of the trickiest parts of the creative process.  There were many missteps along the way, so an example of this comes from this early outline of "My Fair Lady" in which the familiar collides with drastically unfamiliar. So were in act I, scene 3 Higgins's study.  Phonetic noises are heard on the PA in the darkness.  Pickering asks to have the lights turned on, Higgins tells him that darkness aids hearing, so that made it into the show.  But then, Mrs. Higgins arrives with Mrs. Clara Eynsford Hill, the former hoping that the professor will agree to a liaison with the latter.  Miss Eynsford Hill is the same haughty, disagreeable character from the play. After they depart, Higgins sings "Please Don't Marry Me."  So you can see by the end of this that we've diverged from the way the show would eventually go.  Later in the outline, we can see more examples of crafting this story and finding song moments.  For instance, in this scene outside St. George's Church, Lerner writes that the important moment of the scene is when Liza turns on Higgins and suddenly realizes she can deal with them on an equal footing; the moment in which Liza acquires a soul and is finally a completed woman.  This done as a duet. So this is interesting because they never sing a duet in the show.  The "Rain in Spain" is a trio and it's not really what we would think of as a musical theater duet.  The substance of the duet will be Liza saying that she's a brand new woman and needs him no longer and Higgins telling her she is magnificent. At the end of the song, Higgins's dialogue from the play where when he tells her he likes her like this, but five minutes ago she was a millstone around his neck and now she is a tower of strength, so this is familiar from "My Fair Lady."   That he said he'd make a woman of her and by George he did.  But then, Freddy enters and Liza triumphantly says, good-bye and she and Freddy exit together. So this is certainly very different from the way it would end up, so here we're teased with the possibility of Eliza going off with Freddy.  Even once the show is in rehearsal, Lerner had to work hard on refining the script and here a couple of examples of how lives were changed in act II, scene 5 when Higgins finds Eliza at his mother's house near the end of the show.  When offering advice to Eliza, Mrs. Higgins originally said, remember last night you danced with a prince but by the end of the rehearsal period this had become, remember last night you not only danced with a Prince, but you behaved like a princess.  So there's a subtle shift, varies from a kind of a more passive thing of Eliza dancing with someone to Eliza behaving like a princess. It's much more about her own identity and action, actions. So therefore this is a kind of minor change but with big consequences.  Later in the scene when Higgins gets angry at his mother's suggestion that he should be more polite and respectful, the original version reads, you mean I'm to put on my Sunday manners for this creature I picked out of the mud?  But by the end of the rehearsal this had become, you mean I'm to put on my Sunday manners for this thing I created out of the squash cabbage leaves of Covent Garden?  This change places much more emphasis on Higgins and it is the creator of Eliza referencing the Greek Pygmalion myth and finally, at the height of the argument between Eliza and Higgins, originally she said it would make no difference to you if I were there or not and it's cruel of you to pretend that it would.  And this becomes in the final version, but I can get along without you, don't think I can't.  And of course the revised version portrays a much more strongly, as well as, providing a better cue for the song "Without You", so we can see how Lerner had to think about the book, but it's on the high-level of what each scene's general purpose was going to be but also on a more detailed level of the effect of specific words.  Considering now the workshop of Lerner and Loewe, which I promised to discuss in my title, it occurs to me that we were rather keen on being depicted at work as we can see from the selection of images in their younger days.  They like to project the toil of youth as in the top, middle and bottom right photos.  We can see them slightly casually dressed perhaps and sweating away and Lerner is sitting on the floor in the bottom right photo.  And this evolved into a more glamorous still look as in the top left and top right pictures which are very staged and in the bottom left photo is a still from a TV show in the early 1960s after they've ended their collaboration and here you can see that they seem older and they can barely look at each other in this particular still.  So the photographic evidence is actually helpful in trying to access their working methods because it's so unconscious.  So how did Lerner and Loewe work together?  Well, this was Lerner's account of how they worked together.  "After we had arrived at a general outline of a play, in this case there was play and so it was a matter of treatment."  He's talking about "My Fair Lady" and "Pygmalion." "We would then begin discussing the musicalizaiton.  Having decided on the approach, we would then become specific. We would discuss a musical moment until we knew exactly what we were trying to accomplish and then Fritz would wait until I had found a title. He would then sit at the piano and improvise and improvise, and while he was doing so, I was always in the room. After a while, he would always go into a trance and not even quite realize what he was playing until I would suddenly say wait, that's it.  And he continued.  Sometimes he would find the melody in a matter in a hours, sometimes two or three days and once he composed it, he would leave it with me always remaining within reach in case I wish to try a line on him or find out if a small change could be made in the melody to accommodate a lyrical idea.  I was always manic with excitement when he finished a piece of music.  He then left me to my labors."  How this translates into the sources, are and for instance in this holograph score of "It's a Bore" from Gigi which I found in the Lerner papers last year, so this is a kind of outline with just the melody, no words and no harmony.  And the title is there and Lerner had clearly been given the tune to set to words.  And so in this particular case, Alan Lerner never gave it back to Loewe.  In most cases, he would give the lead sheet back to Loewe for him to write words on and he would provide the lyric as a kind of typed list of words basically.  So, this is how they went about creating songs and the sources back this up.  

^M00:38:04 

When I began my work on "My Fair Lady", the real challenge was to differentiate the relationships between the different manuscripts of which there are a huge number. We're very fortunate that the library [inaudible] Loewe's original manuscripts.  Particularly exciting for me is the Warner-Chappell collection which includes twelve boxes with kind of all most of the orchestral parts and choral arrangements and all kinds of bits and pieces.  So all of the categories of score on the list here can be found in the Warner-Chappell collection things like copyist's, scores, arranger's scores, orchestrator's scores, band parts and also some publish materials.  And from this list of manuscripts, we can piece together almost every moment of the scores creation particularly from the rehearsal and preview period.  So for instance here we can see two early sketches for songs that apparently never had lyrics written for them.  One's called the "Underserving Paul" which was probably a song to be sung by Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza's father and on the right, we can see a song called "What's To Become Of Me?" which was probably a song for Eliza to sing in act II, scene 1 but sadly I've never found any words and probably Lerner never got around to it.  It may be that that these songs date from the summer of 1952 when they were still not fully committed to the project, but spent some time creating tunes and then because they discarded their initial ideas and moved on in 1954 and kind of started from scratch.  It is likely that these tunes never went any further than this.  But some of the manuscripts shows interesting things about the later Genesis of the show.  So for instance, this title page of the song "Just You Wait" has this crossed out indication from Loewe in which he writes, "attention Franz", which was Franz Allers the conductor.  "Julie maybe, E flat please try."  So this is the suggestion that they should try out the key, try out the song in a different key which shows us that really the keys in which songs are in musicals isn't necessarily significant; that they would very often be happy to accommodate the needs of individual singers. And a similar source to this from the Warner-Chappell collection sees this little indication at the top "one tone lower."  So clearly, there are all these, there's all this evidence of what it meant to put on a musical in this period from the point of view of the music.  But manuscripts often indicate compositional order as well. So for instance, here we can see Loewe's manuscript for "Get Me To The Church On Time" and we see the reframe there in the top right-hand corner is the number one, but then the verse to the song is written on the previous, on a kind of separate page and it's in the top right-hand corner it says "A" which indicates probably it was tacked on afterwards.  And we can see that there's quite a lot of wasted space on this particular manuscript. So again, we get the sense of perhaps people wrote reframes before they wrote versus or at least that's what happened with this particular example.  A lot of the sources show different versions of familiar songs as well.  So for instance, here we can see a copyist's score for "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" and astonishingly, there's this whole crossed out choral reprise of the song "Without You" so in one of the scripts of the show that I found indicates that this would be sung offstage by a female chorus and that Higgins would be wandering the streets with this song going round and round in his head with them saying, without you, without you, without you.  He doesn't go dam, dam, dam and he goes straight into "I've Grown Accustomed Her to Her Face."  So it's interesting how that appears to have been quite a late change during the rehearsal period.  However, curiously, Loewe's holograph manuscript for the song presents it exactly as it appears in the show.  So, who knows whether this is something that Loewe wrote out after the show had opened or whether this choral reprise was something that was tried out in rehearsal and then abandoned.  There are some very sweet examples where different titles for familiar songs also appear in the sources.  So for instance, Reed 1 in the Warner-Chappell collection for "I Could Have Danced All Night" is labeled "I Should Have Danced All Night."  And then another manuscript for this song shows "I Want to Dance All Night."  I think that I should have danced all night is probably a slip of the pen, but "I Want To Dance All Night" is in Loewe's handwriting and indeed on very early pressings of the original chorus album of "My Fair Lady."  It says "I Want To Dance All Night" rather than I could have danced all night even though this is in the correct lyric in on the album.  So clearly they were on this level of playing with individual words like that to really refine it and make it work.  And another example of this is "On The Street Where You Live" which was right through the Philadelphia previews of the show was called "On The Street Where She Lives", and Freddy sang it in a much more detached way.  Whereas when it became direct and "On the Street Where You Live" it suddenly became a lot warmer and they also rewrote the verse of the song in order to facilitate that kind of change, because the song wasn't going down very well in previews.  One of the most interesting aspects of all these sources that surprised me in terms of the music was the nature of collaboration between Trude Rittmann and Frederick Loewe. It seems that Rittmann and Loewe had a very close personal relationship and that whenever he started to write a musical he would phone up once again Trude who was a dance arranger and also operated as a rehearsal pianist on Broadway in the early years of her career and she eventually got a little bit fed up with him because she saw the patterns coming up.  She was brilliant at her work, but he didn't want to have a permanent relationship with her.  But a lot of the manuscripts for things like scene change music, background music and dance music are in her handwriting rather than his and so here for instance we can see that the piece of music we hear immediately after the overture when Freddy bumps into Eliza it is in her handwriting and it seems that Loewe perhaps didn't write it, didn't sort of compose it directly himself. On the other hand, in various interviews with Rittmann she reported that he would play things on the piano and she would write them down so he would dictate them basically.  So it's hard to know where authorship lies here, but the collaboration between them is fascinating.  And many of the song manuscripts are in both of their handwriting so an example of this is "You Did It." If we kind of slice three lines of the music like this we can see on the top one that this entirely in Loewe's handwriting and then the second line is suddenly in Rittmann's handwriting and in the bottom one, the melody and lyric are in his handwriting but everything else is in her handwriting.  So they worked incredibly closely together in creating the scores for this musical. So this kind of shows us the difference between perhaps Mozart and Broadway.  That we might, we in the study of music we might be used to ideas of composers slaving away in their rooms and writing the score which is the work and everything is kind of neatly there.  With musicals, even with a composer like Loewe who was very musically literate and had a strong sense of authorial identity, he still expected these kinds of collaborations. He wouldn't write down every not himself.  Nevertheless, he was more involved, most composers on Broadway were, so for instance there is this score of overture where although he didn't write out every bar of the overture he writes out everything that isn't a simply a playing of a song. So all the transition music, the opening fanfare, all of it is in his handwriting and then he tells the orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett at the top which songs he wants to hear and which keys to play them in.  So it's kind of interesting that on one level he's very involved and then on another level he's not as involved as we might perhaps expect.  But the single manuscripts that brought home this collaboration to me was this one again from the Warner-Chappell collection.  So, this is the final few bars of the show and it's in Rittmann's hand and she writes, 'At the end of the soliloquy one full chorus of a "Accustomed" in F" strict tempo de Rodgers.' Okay, so this is a reference to the fact that Rittmann and Bennett frequently worked with Richard Rodgers who favored quite a slow tempo and then underneath she writes, "Molto esspressivo" because which a kind of dig at Richard Rodgers to say he could also be quite a boring conductor, so can we please have it very expressive.  And then on the next, on the other side of the page, the very final bars of the show at the end she writes, "[Foreign words spoken]", the end thank God" And underneath, Loewe writes [foreign words spoken], so me to your friend Fritz.  And the interesting thing about this is it's the only example of what is assumed to be an arrangement manuscript that has clearly been signed off by him which suggests that he looked at every single bar of music that went into the show before it went into the show, so although he might not have been there literally writing out every word, he really oversaw it.  And this kind of brings home the relationships between composer, arranger and orchestrator because this score would have then gone to one of the shows orchestrators to produce the full instrumentation.  Another interesting thing from the sources is the idea of cutting material as requested, so there were quite a lot of songs that were cut from the show and amongst the Loewe collection materials in particular.  So for instance, here we have a song called "Please Don't Marry Me" which I mentioned earlier in connection with Clara Eynsford Hills's visit to the house and the song refers to things like I have a secret love song complete with, I can't read that from here.  

^M00:48:21 

But the point is the reference is to allow them references to marriage in this song immediately open up questions about the relationship between Eliza and Higgins and this was the thing that Lerner and Loewe worked the hardest on to refine as they went through, because at the time, one might expect Rodgers and Hammerstein type cliché typical conventional love songs in musicals and because of the particular relationship between Eliza and Higgins this wasn't going to work, but every time they sat down to write a song it ended up like this. Another one was called "There's a Thing Called Love" in the twinkling of an eye you know the meaning of and so Eliza was going on and on about how she loves Higgins or how she perceives that love is somewhere between them and this is one of nine songs that they wrote for the spot "Where I Could Have Danced All Night" eventually and appeared.  So they kept having to work and work to refine it.  For the last few minutes of my talk I want to deal with the very first preview of the show, because it shows another aspect of the workshop of Lerner and Loewe.  So a lot of the things I've looked at perhaps deal with what they were doing in theory, on paper but once they got the show on its feet and saw it on the stage and could hear things, then changes had to happen and that is the nature of opera as well as musical theater, but it's a big part of musicals.  It's not just the case that these people write scores and hand it to the production team and that's the end.  So on the 4th of February 1956, "My Fair Lady" had its world premiere in New Haven at the Shubert Theater.  And everyone loved the show, but agreed it was very long and so they Lerner and Loewe started to look at what they could remove and they decided to replace a sequence of two songs and the ballet with a two minute dialogue scene and that's what brought the show into refinement and the interesting thing about these songs is that none of them are well neither of songs are bad songs or there's not necessarily anything inherently wrong with them and so thinking about the workshop as being a practical thing as well it shows that they were willing to cut quite good material in order to make the thing work.  So I want you to look at each of these numbers briefly and I should explain that the scene that replaced all of this is the one where Eliza appears at the top of the stairs in her beautiful ball gown and Higgins drinks the port and then they go off to the ball, so this 15 minute stretch of music and singing and dancing was replaced by that one brief moment.  So, originally what happened in the show for this one performance in New Haven because they fixed it by the middle of the following week, and Eliza, Higgins and Pickering return from Ascot where Eliza has had a disastrous and entry in society and Eliza wants to give up and so Higgins realizes that he has to be nice to her for once and so he sang this song "Come To The Ball." Last year got all these materials from the library's collections and got my students at the University of Sheffield to play them for the first time since the 4th of February 1956.  So we're going to hear clips of recordings of the three of them now.  So first of all, and here go with "Come To The Ball", hopefully it won't be too loud.  Here we go.  

>> Oh, come to the ball!  Oh, come to the ball!  It wouldn't be fair to the men who were there to deny them.  All the dreams you'll provide them.  There even may be a dashing Marquis who feature by feature will swear you're the creature he's always prayed for, single stayed for. If you aren't there his complete despair will be painful to see. So come to the ball.  Come to the ball!  

^M00:52:28
[ Music ] 
^M00:52:32

Come to the ball. Come to the ball with me.  

^M00:52:38
[ Music ] 
^M00:52:42

Consider the lord so frantically bored he's leaving his kin and becoming an [inaudible] hoping danger's the answer.  Your innocent [inaudible] will dazzle him so, but glancing at you will restore his illusions and as he prances, farewell glances should he die alas at the Khyber Pass, what a loss it would be.  So come to the ball.  Come to the ball!  Come to the ball.  Come to the ball with me.  

>> Dominic McHugh:  It's quite extraordinary.  Nathen Spencer who we're hearing sing there is 19-years-old or he was when he did this so, very proud of the students.  Anyway, interestingly from the very beginning of hiring Rex Harrison for the part of Henry Higgins they all thought that this song was going to be his big moment and that this is what was going to be the hit song and bring the house down and this is what he was going to show off and he only did once.  And at this point where we've just cutoff the song, there's an interlude section in which he says, "I can see you now in a gown by Madam Worth when you enter every monocle will crash."  Which is set to the same music as "I Can See Her Now Mrs. Freddy Eynsford Hill."  So this is like a kind of reprise mirroring thing between the big number at the end act I that should have been there and the big number at the end of act II which was cut.  So if we wanted to see some kind of imbalance in "My Fair Lady" then that might be it because there's no longer a reminiscence in the final version of the show.  Then, poor Hanya Holm also had her big moment of the show removed.  So Hanya Holm was the choreographer of the show and big choreographers write creating musicals in this period like she'll have an enormous ballet, so we think of the dream ballet in "Oklahoma: of Agnes de Mille for instance and so poor Hanya spent months and months and months creating this ballet in which we see Eliza having her second series of lessons, because of course the first series has not been successful because Eliza has humiliated herself and she conceived the ballet as a kind of nightmare.  So I'm not going to read all this out but you can see here that she describes that Higgins finishes singing "Come to the Ball", the lights come up for her and he starts the metronome and with a sadistic look to Eliza he goes upstairs in rhythm to the tick of an instrument. The entrance of the first worker that can blend with his exit or it can be instrumental with the beginning and further down at the very bottom you can see it says, "The Cobbler finds unwilling feet, utter resentment if not ill-will to accept.  She signifies defeat and depression and during this entire procedure she's speaks to herself practicing speech bits like a puppet with the invisible whip of Higgins above her.  And in another kind of sketch for the ballet, Higgins at one point goes up to her with a revolver and holds it to her head and says you will continue and you will continue working.  The music for the ballet was based on Loewe's themes but Rittmann sketched out the whole thing and we can see here the first two pages of her piano score for the ballet with a lot of crossing it out and working.  So clearly she the one putting this together in collaboration with Hanya Holm the choreographer and so I thought we hear the final few seconds because you'll be astonished at how far from the sound world of "My Fair Lady" it is. 

^M00:56:25
[ Music ] 
^M00:56:45

It's like the curse has come upon me cried "The Lady of Shallot." It's just so deep and so we can see how this didn't go down very well and all of the people involved in dancing the number reported that it never really worked because they were doing it on the library set that was full of furniture and so no one could get around or do any dancing, because they kept falling over things and they referred to the ballet as the thing.  Anyway, having taught Eliza what to do now, she then turns to Mrs. Pearce and to the maids and sings the song "Say a Prayer for me Tonight."  Many of you may know this from the movie "Gigi" where it was eventually transported to, but the song is one of the first songs for the show to written. It's one from 1952 and what was played in New Haven is pretty much what was heard in the film "Gigi", but in 1952 there was an extra verse which shows a more romantic and more explicitly romantic sentiment so I thought I would play you a small amount of this.  You can see the verse here where she's saying "Say a prayer for me tonight that the night will bring me everything I've waited for. Say a prayer that he will discover I'm his lover for now and ever more."  Now the New Haven audience didn't hear this, but there's something about the sentiment of this lyric that informs the way that the song is even in its final version that is very sentimental and romantic.  So here is the end of it to remind you of it.

>> And say a prayer that he'll remember long ago somewhere he said a prayer for me.  

^M00:58:33
[ Music ] 
^M00:58:44

>> Dominic McHugh:  So I should mention that the orchestration we're hearing there is exactly what was heard in New Haven taken from the Warner-Chappell documents.  So by cutting this long sequence of music and movement and replacing it with a two minute dialogue scene, Lerner and Loewe brought the show brilliantly into focus and so this is the final aspect of their workshop if you like bringing it together with initial ideas, writing the songs and then knowing what to do with the show as a whole and of course that was done in collaboration with Moss Hart as the director and Hanya Holm as the choreographer and everyone else involved in it.  So in conclusion, the library's remarkable collection of the shows manuscripts reveal not only Lerner and Loewe's painstaking process of adapting Shaw's "Pygmalion" into a musical of finesse, but also the fact that the usual Broadway production line was in place while generating the score.  Lerner and Loewe wanted to write a wonderful musical and a Broadway hit and they did, but the show's reception history obscures both the pain they went through to write it and the fact that they could have never have anticipated what it would come to mean to people.  Their focus was as always to get the show on the stage and they relied on arrangers, copyists and orchestrators to help them achieve their task. Beyond the workshop of Lerner and Loewe, the audience helped it to turn it into an all-time hit and a cultural icon from Broadway to Barbie via my Square Laddie. When "My Fair Lady" closed in September 1962 after a remarkable 6-and-a-half year run on Broadway, the New York Times reported on the events of the final performance neatly summarizing this point, "At the final curtain, just before the singing of "Auld Lang Syne" smiling no tears, coauthor Alan J. Lerner remarked that among all the credits for the success of the show, one had been pretty much overlooked, the audience.  He had a point and we accept it with deep gratitude. The street where the theater lives does have two sides and both were at their best with "My Fair Lady."  It was our show.  Thank you.  

^M01:00:51
[ Applause ] 
^M01:01:08

Thank you.  So I think have time for a few questions now.  Yes.

>> With the microphone.  Microphone.  

>> Dominic McHugh:  Oh, hang on you have to have the microphone or the people at home can't hear.  

>> What was the idea between having such a young Eliza with such the older professor, because it didn't seem like a logical match to me in terms of; it seemed to me more like a father-daughter than a regular relationship?  At least that is the perception.  And I loved the show, I mean it's a.  

>> Dominic McHugh:  What do you mean by a regular relationship?

>> Well, [brief laughter] that's probably a bad thing to say.  I take that back.  

>> Dominic McHugh:  Okay.  Well I think one thing I do think about the age gap is there is an age gap, but the casting in the movie has really disrupt it from what it was Broadway.  That Julie Andrews was I think 19-20 and Harrison was in his 40s and by the time he made the movie he was quite a few years older and in order to accommodate that.  Audrey Hepburn is also too old as Eliza and Wilfred Hyde-White is sort a quite an old Pickering and the whole thing has that slightly heavy feel about it that imagine it probably didn't have on Broadway.  I wasn't there. Walter in the corner there saw it in July 1956, so he could probably tell us more about this than I can, but it seems to me that that is an aspect of the shows freshness that's been lost. In terms of the nature of their relationship, I think it's clear from the number of romantic things that they removed from the show, was that really they never intended Higgins and Eliza to be seen as a romantic couple.  Of course, something is stake because if they don't care about each other at all, then it's academic and that's not Broadway in the 1950s, but nevertheless, I think really it is what it is. The story is about teaching her to become another person that Higgins has this socialist point of view that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover and that we do and that he's going to prove this by experimenting on someone and then in act II he has to deal with what he's done because he's realized that in the process of doing this he has made Eliza uncomfortable with his years, she can't go back to where she was and she is not comfortable with the people she's with now and this is the, all the interest in act II.  I think the second act of the musical is unusually kind of intriguing for a Broadway musical.  It's very often they just wrap up a story, whereas in act II, there are all these discussions about what are we're going to do now?  Because of course the experiment is over by the end of act I.  So act II is about something completely new.  I'm not sure that answers the question, but anyway I said lots of things.  Yes.  

>> There's an urban legend I heard that the title "My Fair Lady' was actually, oh sorry.  Urban legend I've heard that the title "My Fair Lady" was actually arrived at because it was a Cockney version of "Mayfair Lady" as in "My Fair Lady".  Any truth to that?

>> Dominic McHugh:  I don't think any English person would buy into that, because Cockney people don't pronounce Mayfair like that, and they actually didn't think "My Fair Lady" was that great a title.  That it was just one of many titles that were going around, they were going to call it London Pride and then they realized and they might have a problem with the [inaudible] song.  One of Gershwin's musicals in the 1920s, I think it's called Tell me More was originally called My Fair Lady in previews.  So it was just a kind of generic operetta title.  I don't think it has anything to do with "Mayfair" personally and I've never seen any evidence that that's the reason why it was called that.  They came up with the title on about the 27th of December 1956, so just before they went into rehearsal and up to that point they were calling it My Lady Liza or My Darling Liza, some of the letters call it.  So I think it was just, it was always going to be My something and it ended up like that.  Yes.  

>> You mean me?

>> Dominic McHugh:  Well anybody.  

>> Hi.  Could you reminisce on how Julie Andrews did get the part that when it went from Mary Martin to Julie Andrews do you know?

>> Dominic McHugh:  So one of the differences between 52 and 54 was that in 1954 they decided to do "My Fair Lady" much more like "Pygmalion."  So, certainly really it needed to be a British person and it needed to be someone age appropriate. They weren't writing for a Mary Martin, Ethel Merman type.  It wasn't going to be a star vehicle in that sense and the star really went from being a Eliza to Higgins, so now the whole thing was framed Rex Harrison.  He earned the most, he was the one with this huge royalty check from the cast album, he was insisting on being paid more than everyone else. So it was very much revolving around him.  Julie Andrews was playing the lead in "The Boyfriend" on Broadway at the time when they went back into trying to find an Eliza and they just went to see her and thought she was great and offered her the part, but they did look at other people at the time too.  Sally Ann Howes who took over from Julie Andrews on Broadway was also considered for to play the part at it's opening.  Another audition sheet I found shows that Petula Clark auditioned for it in about March or April 1955.  So clearly a number of people were around, but Andrews was a hot star, a hot star in the making at the time. She wasn't quite a star but it was clear that she could become that and, of course, months after "My Fair Lady", or about a year, Rodgers and Hammerstein got her to play Cinderella in their TV musical version of Cinderella and so she was kind of suddenly everywhere. She was in a TV musical with Bing Crosby called "High Tor" with music by Arthur Schwartz one of my favorite composers in this period.  So, that's kind of how it came about.  

>> On the table, on the display table over there there's a poster for Italian.

>> Dominic McHugh:  Yes.

>> Production.  I'm curious if you've looked at any of the non-English language productions?  What did they do with all of the English dialect, the London dialect things in the play?  

>> Dominic McHugh:  They did different things in different places.  I actually don't know a great deal about it.  I can spend years and years looking into this, because it's such a huge topic but I understand that the Hebrew version kind of used a like a local rhyme that had nothing to do with the "Rain in Spain" but it was similar to that and Lerner and Loewe did sign off on that kind of change on the basis that it should be work for local audiences.  Loewe was very involved in the German translation of "My Fair Lady."  A friend of mine has some correspondence about how he sort of went through it and decided how it should go.  On an unrelated, but on the same topic when "Gigi" was released, Lerner who spoke French fluently got involved in the translation of that and insisted that it be dubbed into French and not simply surtitled.  So they kind of were remarkably involved in that and documents from the large Lars Schmidt collection on the table and in the library reveal an incredible performance history that needs to be looked into. He produced the show all over Europe and there's all kinds of fascinating information about how he went about it.  

^M01:08:51
^M01:08:59  

>> Monday was Moss Hart's 112th birthday and in listening to the radio there was a story about how he called Audrey Hepburn absolutely ruthless. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the transformation of "My Fair Lady" from a Broadway musical to a movie with a different Eliza?  

>> Dominic McHugh:  Well, Moss Hart was very dead when the movie was made so I don't know quite what that refers to, but what I can tell you is that Audrey Hepburn was considered for Eliza on Broadway, that I found a letter that proved that they absolutely thought of her in the Broadway version and so when everyone was very critical of her in the movie, including Lerner and Loewe, it's interesting that actually they thought of her very seriously and apparently they had a rumor that she was pregnant and that's why they just assumed that she couldn't play it anymore, because they thought she won't be available.  I'm mean [inaudible] available.  So, I  really don't know about her being absolutely ruthless.  I know most people seem to think she was a nice person and that she was very upset when she discovered that she was being dubbed in the movie.  Personally I think that she's not as terrible as people may have in the movie, she is too old but I think that in the second half of the movie particularly the scene with Harrison where they had just come back from the ball that she, you can see real movie star acting going on there and it's quite electric.  I think it's slightly under rated, but obviously elsewhere in the film she's less than ideal.  

>> Why didn't Julie get the part?

>> Dominic McHugh:  Why didn't she get the part?  Partly it was because she filmed three movies back to back; "Mary Poppins", "The Americanization of Emily", and "The Sound of Music" and so she was busy for a long period there and all three movies were in the can before "Mary Poppins" was released.  And well the "The Sound of Music" wasn't, but the first two were in the can and so it was all very difficult in terms of her availability.  Lerner's desire was to make the movie at least in 1960, he said with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews who were playing "Camelot" on Broadway at the time and he wanted Vincente Minnelli who had directed both "Gigi" and "An American in Paris" [inaudible] for that matter and that was what he wanted.  He wanted it to be an MGM film and he really, Lerner hated the movie "My Fair Lady" and he was very open about it in his memoir. This isn't any great discovery of mine.  He loathed it and he thought it was a terrible piece of work.  Nathen.

>> Yes.

>> Dominic McHugh:  Hello.

>> Hello. Thank you for making this narrative so vivid.  I have a question about one of Lerner's letters.  In the outlining of the show, at one point he mentions that the music will of course be, I forget the superlative, it's like the most beautiful or the most gorgeous every written for the musical stage or something along those lines, and this is very early in the process and I'm not asking this question to cast out on Loewe's compositional promise or potential or prevalence, but it just struck me that this was something that Lerner seemed to need to put down on paper or that he had the authority to speak on as the lyricist and not the composer of the show.  I'm just struck by the particular phrasing in this early outline of the show.  Was it just to set the expectation down on paper so that this would be the standard that they'd set themselves to?  

>> Dominic McHugh:  Well I think probably this particular outline was designed for possibly Mary Martin who they were getting to do it or another one of the people they were trying to persuade to be in it. So they were saying this is what the show is going to be like and look how many ideas we have and Lerner did this a lot through his career. He would promise the earth.  He'd say it's the boldest musical, it's the biggest musical, it's the most expensive musical and it's going to be the best thing ever written and I think that that's where it's coming from.  It's not really sort of private notes.

>> Right, right.

>> Dominic McHugh:  The were notes about the ballet were very much Hanya Holm's notes to herself about how she was going to do it. Whereas the outline was probably for dissemination even if it was only amongst a few people.  

>> Great.  Thank you.

>> Dominic McHugh:   Thank you.  Anyone else?  Great well thank you very much for coming.

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Do I like the movie she asking me?  Well as I said, I think parts of it work really well.  I think if you see it in widescreen, maybe on a curved screen, a very  you know a really perfect cinema that what a great way to spend an afternoon. In terms of as a representation of the show, I do think it has a slightly stodgy feel and that that's a shame.  It's a shame that Hart couldn't be involved or Minnelli would have created something with much more finesse.  I love the movie "Gigi:"  And I think that for the movie "My Fair Lady" is miles away from in in terms of the overall esthetic, the handling of musicals on the screen. So I have mixed feelings about it, but I mean it seems ridiculous to dismiss it when it's such an achievement.  Thank you.

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>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov.

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