The Genealogy of a Show: Play, Movie, Musical
By Frank McGilly
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Alert readers of this website or of the program for My Fair Lady will have noted that the show is based on the play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, and on the movie Pygmalion, produced by Gabriel Pascal. This acknowledgement that the musical owes something to the movie, as well as to the play, may be a 'first' for CTF: it does not appear in the published version of My Fair Lady, nor in the program of the original Broadway production nor in any of the promotional material about the movie version of My Fair Lady. This nod to the film is wholly justified; the musical follows the lead of the movie in a number of places where the movie differed from the stage play.
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And Gabriel Pascal was involved first in the adaptation of the play to the movie and later in that of the play and the movie to the musical.
I - The Play
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Shaw was very serious about both of the themes of Pygmalion: the potential of scientific phonetics to improve English usage, and the ways in which class distinctions and prejudices were reinforced by differences in speech. He was serious, too, about success in the theatre. He tailored the part of Eliza to the formidable charms of a particular actress, Mrs. Pat Campbell, a reigning stage siren of the day. 'What does it matter if she can't act?', he wrote in a letter, 'she just is.' For some time around the preparation of the play for the stage, Shaw appears indeed to have been more than a little infatuated with Mrs. Campbell.
Oddly, for a play in which the English language is virtually a leading character, Pygmalion was first staged in Germany, in 1913. The reason for this was the trouble the play had with the then official
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censor of the British stage, the Lord Chamberlain. The problem, believe it or not, was Eliza's use of the word 'bloody' at one point in the play, and the delighted repetition of 'bloody' by a sweet young upper-class maiden. In the end, the play was presented, with Mrs. Campbell as Eliza and the leading English actor of the day, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, as Professor Higgins, and was an enormous success.
Shaw knew perfectly well that audiences would expect the leading characters to fall in love. He was resolved otherwise. In his brief preface to the play, he declared explicitly that he would not allow a romantic note to drown out his didactic message about language and class. 'I wouldn't marry you if you asked me,' snaps Eliza to Higgins, and she means it. Shaw even wrote a 'Sequel' in which he explained, laboriously, why Eliza would not marry Higgins.
II - Play to Movie
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Some time in the 1930s Gabriel Pascal met Shaw. Although Pascal's previous cinematic output had been, let us say, limited, Shaw came to regard Pascal as the only film producer he could trust. Pascal prevailed upon Shaw not only to allow Pygmalion to be made into a movie, but to participate in its production. The movie was a great hit. Shaw won the Academy Award for best scriptwriter of 1938, thus becoming the only person ever to have been accorded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.
Pascal either produced or directed, or both, three other movies based on Shaw plays. Major Barbara was a hit, Androcles and the Lion a disappointment, and Caesar and Cleopatra a resounding flop.
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While most of the dialogue of the movie comes straight from the play, there are some important differences, the most important being the final outcome. In the movie, though Eliza's and Higgins's only physical contact is a fight, not an embrace, it is clear that they do. Shaw evidently accepted that movie audiences around the world would absolutely expect Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard (the leads) to get together in the end, and would be offended by any other outcome.
The movie shows a different version of Eliza's vocal training. Notably, it introduces anew her struggles with the line, 'The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain'.
IV - Movie to Musical
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After Shaw's death in 1950, Pascal retained certain production rights over Pygmalion. He came up with the idea of making a musical comedy out of the play. It was not an easy sell. He first broached the idea to Rodgers and Hammerstein, no less. They declined; we do not know what they later thought of their decision. Pascal subsequently approached the team of Allan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who had had a great success with Brigadoon. In time, they accepted; My Fair Lady opened on Broadway in 1956. The rest, as we say, is history. Somewhat sadly, Pascal died too soon to enjoy the financial rewards of his share in the theatrical property, estimated at about $2,000,000 (1950s dollars). The story goes that that sum was contested over by a couple of the women in his latter life.
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Lerner, who wrote the script as well as the lyrics, showed commendable respect for Shaw's original dialogue. Part of the enjoyment of tracing the line from play to musical is seeing some of Shaw's lines converted into great songs. One relishes what Lerner has done with lines like 'The English will not teach their children to speak' and 'It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him' (both actually from the Preface, not the play); 'He says she's Hungarian - and of royal blood!'; 'I can do without you'; "I've grown accustomed to your voice'; and, most memorably, 'The rain in Spain'. It is, however, only fair to say that most of the songs are wholly the invention of Lerner and Loewe, while remaining consistent with Shaw's characters.
Lerner had to face the fact that an audience in the loose-lipped 1950s would not so much as raise an eyebrow at Eliza's 'Not bloody likely', which in the play and movie caused such consternation. He deftly moved the location from the home of Henry Higgins's mother to the posh club tent at the Ascot racetrack, and gave Eliza a line which, as we are reminded in Freddy's love-struck song, rhymes with 'farce'.
