THE MAKING OF A MUSICAL HIT
Funke, Lewis
The Making of A Musical Hit by LEWIS FUNKE PERIODICALLY, if not with the regularity of the seasons, a musical production explodes on Broadway with consequences that can be classified only under...
...Suddenly, everyone and his proverbial uncle acquires a passion to get to the sacred theater at the same time, and the hunt and chase for tickets assumes the brawling, no-holds-barred character of the celebrated race for Sutter's Mill...
...Tynan, who is regarded in England as one of the bright young men on the theater scene, keen of perception, decisive in his tastes, and colorfully articulate in reporting them, wrote, "Music is an addiction...
...As Eliza, Julie Andrews is perfect...
...Indeed, it was James Thurber, one of the few truly eminent humorists of our time, who wrote not so long ago in the New York Times that the combination of Shaw and his adapters had resulted in the restoration of comedy to a position of dignity in the theater...
...Besides, there is Lieutenant Cable, a young man who falls in love with Liat and yet cannot bring himself to marry her...
...They have a durability that should give them life for generations to come, no less than the music of Jerome Kern and George Gershwin...
...Indeed, long before Messrs...
...Lerner and Loewe applied themselves to transferring Pygmalion to the musical stage, at least a half dozen other teams had been offered a chance but had shied away out of fear of contrast with Shaw...
...Tynan goes on to observe that a quick glance at theatrical history should be enough to reveal the identity of the great absentee...
...The illicit traffic in tickets for the production has been fabulously heavy...
...My Fair Lady nets fifteen to sixteen thousand dollars weekly...
...Having said all this by way of attempting to explain what has made this musical one so sought-after by theater-goers, I must go on to cite one remaining fundamental asset...
...The result is a musical not only abounding in grace, style, and intelligence, but also one embellished with that treasure of mankind—laughter...
...Those who know and love the stage will concur in the Thurber analysis with a hearty "Amen...
...She travels the range from uncouth flower peddler to lady of fashion with a sureness and grace of development that is a delight to behold...
...Nor is the history of South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, and the oth-ers much different...
...The New York license commissioner has been investigating...
...Each of the musicals ' I have mentioned has been composed by men who are able to rise above the banalities of Tin Pan Alley...
...eventually there will be road companies and a movie...
...Each morning, as the first shafts of dawn color the Broadway sky you can see sleepless souls waiting in line at the theater, hopefully seeking standing-room privileges for the night's performance...
...they are not inborn...
...Although My Fair Lady does not deal in such contemporary thought, it is concerned, nevertheless, with people who are attractive, intelligent, and vital in themselves...
...Citizens of otherwise fastidious scruples abandon all qualms about paying off scalpers in under-the-counter prices...
...It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug...
...Cecil Beaton, as costume designer, and Oliver Smith, as scene designer, have given the utmost of their talents to make My Fair Lady visually one of the most attractive musicals of this century...
...The fact that a Shaw comedy described by him as 'didactic art' dealing with a 'dry as dust' subject, namely, the young female laboratory specimen, seems likely to become the most popular entertainment in Broadway history is a great argument in favor of something more inspiring in the comic theater than we have been getting...
...They all have a touch of poetry in their lyrics, far above the ordinary rhyming of June with moon...
...Since Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein Il, with a talented assist from choreographer Agnes de Mille, turned the late Lynn Riggs' Green Grow the Lilacs into an American classic, there have been such items on the musical boards as Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific, The King and I, and currently, as everyone doubtless knows, My Fair Lady...
...Those directly connected with the show plead with the telephone company to take their names from the public lists...
...Lerner's lyrics for My Fair Lady not only advance the action of the musical, but they also enhance the lines and ideas of the man whose work is the basis of the show, George Bernard Shaw—which, you will concede, is no mean trick in itself...
...Overall director Moss Hart, himself a writer of considerable stature in the musical theater, has pulled everything together with a sureness and a sense of proportion that stamps him as one of the ablest men in the business...
...Is music fulfilling a need formerly satisfied in some other way...
...Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins has never given a better performance...
...Rodgers' tunes for Oklahoma...
...How much more he will make on his remaining ten per cent, how much the others will gross, still remains to be seen...
...He can't sing a note, yet he gives the songs entrusted to him such verve, force, and conviction that the defect is barely noticeable...
...The thought is abhorrent to her provincial mind and she is unable to face up to love...
...A hundred or more may be there in quest of the thirty standing-room tickets permitted by fire department regulations...
...South Pacific, and The King and I; Loewe's for Brigadoon and My Fair Lady...
...Tickets at the boxoffice for the immediate future for My Fair Lady are non-existent, and tickets by mail at this writing require a six-months wait provided the boxoffice is given the ultimate selection of available dates...
...There is much to be said for Tynan's argument...
...canny hostesses entertain drama editors, who discover they have scores of long-lost friends who really never stopped thinking of them but who somehow never felt the need to call until the hit came to town...
...Under the capital gains tax system Levin was thus able to stash away $237,500 for himself...
...As had been the case with its great predecessors, My Fair Lady is the product of the combined professionalism and taste not only of its composer and librettist but also of a topflight cast, director, choreographer, costume designer, and scene designer who, working together, have produced magic...
...The phonetics professor Henry Higgins, discovering a guttersnipe of a flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, sets out to turn her into a lady through proper diction...
...The Shavian talent for wit, satire, the sharp phrase, and the comic view of all mankind, have been wonderfully well retained, and, in some ways, admirably enhanced...
...Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas, discovers that Emit de Becque, to whom she has lost her heart, is a Frenchman who married a native woman of the islands and fathered two of her children...
...Cole Porter's for Kiss Me, Kate...
...Obviously, bonanza is a feeble word for such as Strike...
...Herman Levin, the producer, owned 30 per cent, of which he sold two-thirds to a couple of gentlemen for $450,000 after the show opened...
...and Frank Loesser's for Guys and Dolls have songs that have become what the industry calls standards...
...They are played and replayed...
...Before trying to discover what the ingredients are for a successful musical and specifically the ingredients of My Fair Lady, I would like to note what Kenneth Tynan, the British critic, recently said about the popularity of musicals in general...
...The conflicts of wills, the triumph of Henry Higgins' idea, and the peace that he makes with Eliza sets My Fair Lady far above the sophomoric capers of the musicals of another day in which boy met girl, lost her through some silly misunderstanding, and then regained her to live happily ever after...
...Sticking with Tynan's soaring no-tion, I want to note one more factor in terms of the modern American musical, particularly for those men-tioned above...
...one broker has been barred from the business for life...
...The Making of A Musical Hit by LEWIS FUNKE PERIODICALLY, if not with the regularity of the seasons, a musical production explodes on Broadway with consequences that can be classified only under the heading of "madness...
...This twenty-one-year-old English girl has both beauty of face and form plus a voice that is sweet, pure, and true...
...Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes...
...Certainly no one can dispute the fact that Hammerstein in South Pacific, Oklahoma!, and The King and I gave us lyrics with depth and intelligence...
...Another major factor contributing to the success of so many of the musicals since the war is the undeniable trend toward dealing in stories that are engrossing in themselves, what the trade calls the book, plus the portraiture of characters made up of human flesh and sinew...
...Stanley Holloway as Eliza's alcholic father and Robert Coote as Colonel Pickering are aces in the deck...
...What the drama itself lacks is poetry...
...a London production is in the making...
...The story of South Pacific, simple in its outline, nevertheless is founded in material that is pertinent to our time—the need for the elimination of prejudice and hate based upon color, creed, and race...
...They are fundamentally sound musicians with impeccable taste and a flair for melodic interpretation...
...To explain why, we must do a little detective work...
...This phenomenon doesn't happen often in comedy, or in anything else, but when it does it's a time for putting out flags...
...it is Shaw who is at the heart of My Fair Lady...
...Tall and masculine, Harrison shows himself to be an actor of energy, sincerity, and intelligence...
...The record indicates that My Fair Lady, for which Alan Jay Lerner adapted Shaw's Pygmalion and also wrote the lyrics to music composed by Frederick Loewe, cost $340,000 to produce...
...Broadway and its citizens have witnessed these shenanigans a half dozen times or so since 1943, when Oklahoma...
...The sum was advanced by the Columbia Broadcasting System in return for first television rights and a 40 per cent ownership in the stage show itself...
...Now that poets are few and furtive, the job has passed to the musicians...
...in their hands the drama takes off and soars...
...Sheer skill or talent is not enough, and neither is the excitation of the retina and the eardrum...
...What they say and what they think have substance and credibility...
...LEWIS FUNKE is the drama editor of the New York Times...
...It is he who sings "You Have To Be Taught," the song in which the philosophy of the show is intertwined—the idea that prejudice and hate are taught by environment...
...Is it replacing something else that has vanished from the theater...
...Thurber wrote, "By dignity I mean the high place attained only when the heart and mind are lifted equally and at once, by the creative union of perception and grace...
...Something must explode deeper inside the beholder, like a silent skyrocket...
...Fundamentally, its account of the transformation of a human being is an inherently exciting one...
...Unlike the many musicals that preceded the war in which the hero and heroine were fabricated of one-dimension cardboard, the modern musical has for its cast people who are entirely believable and real...
...All of us," says Tynan, "feel high at times and an urge to rise above the prosaic, to crystallize what we are thinking in a form more heightened than plain talk, to express ourselves in a language that transcends the mundane...
...ushered in what many regard as the Golden Age of the American Musical...
...Lerner and Loewe own 15 per cent...
Vol. 20 • December 1956 • No. 12
