Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe: My Fair Lady. Scarlett Strallen, Jamie Parker, Alun Armstrong, Malcolm Sinclair, Laurence Kilsby, Julia McKenzie, Penelope Wilton; “My Fair Lady” Ensemble and Sinfonia of London conducted by John Wilson. Chandos. $43.99 (2 SACDs).
John Wilson’s determined march through some of the greatest American musicals has brought him and his ensemble to the most British of them all: My Fair Lady. And this is another absolutely wonderful foray into the realm of completeness and “historical performance practices” where the Broadway theater (or theatre) is concerned, with the correct size of orchestra (as used at the première in 1956), instruments of mid-1950s type, and every bit of music created for the show – including some that was never used, which also means including a spoken element that represents the core of the original play: “How often I’ve thought how frightfully exciting it would be to take a human being and change her into quite a different human being by creating a new speech for her.”
Those musings of Professor Henry Higgins, the mid-career academic and confirmed bachelor (regarding which he doth protest rather too much), are the heart of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), which – despite being the most immediately appealing among Shaw’s remarkable output of 60 plays – has at its core an important contemporary-for-its-time satirical message about superficialities vs. profundities of language and culture. That is not the core that audiences took away from it: right from the start, they gravitated to the Higgins/Eliza Doolittle personality conflict and the undoubted spark of attraction that they were sure would eventually become a raging flame engulfing both the professor and his 20-years-or-so-younger protégé.
They were wrong. Shaw steadfastly resisted, with a mixture of remarks both avuncular and curmudgeonly, any suggestion of a straightforward “happy ending” for Higgins and Eliza, even writing an essay in 1916 explaining why it was impossible for Higgins and Eliza to marry and live ’appily ever hafter.
Matters percolated along through multiple unsuccessful attempts to turn Pygmalion into a stage musical, eventually coming to a head after Shaw wrote much of the screenplay for the 1938 film version of Pygmalion. Shaw rewrote the play’s ending for the movie, allowing Higgins and Eliza a tender what-might-have-been farewell – after which a scene showed Eliza happily married to Freddy and running the flower shop that she said, early on, that she would like to have one day. The film’s director (Gabriel Pascal) altered Shaw’s alteration to make it a bit more ambiguous, and some of Shaw’s emendations made their way into a revised version of Pygmalion that was published in 1941, and…well, there is more than a bit of interesting literary and theatrical history there, for those inclined to explore it.
Wilson, however, understandably cares mostly about the musical history, which picks up from the 1938 Pygmalion film on which Lerner and Loewe based My Fair Lady after they (and others before them) concluded that working from the original Pygmalion just would not do. Their decision was fortuitous, even inspired, and resulted in this sixth of the creators’ eight stage musicals becoming by far their longest-running Broadway success and, along with Camelot (1960, their seventh collaboration), emerging and enduring as the heart of their legacy.
What Wilson and his absolutely first-rate assemblage of singers and musicians do so well in this Chandos release is to respect, even honor, the My Fair Lady of 70 years ago, while presenting the musical with all the skill, enthusiasm, and first-rate sound that a modern performance and recording can bring to it. Completeness is all well and good – and it really is good in this world première complete recording, with nearly half an hour of additional material that ranges from the trivial to the genuinely intriguing (the original ending of Act I is especially fascinating). But it is the handling of the musical itself that is really impressive, re-impressing even on audiences that know the famously hummable songs just how well they are integrated into the story: Wouldn’t It Be Loverly, With a Little Bit of Luck, I Could Have Danced All Night, On the Street Where You Live, the always amazing The Rain in Spain (introduced in the 1938 film along with the aitchy “Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire” exercise), and more. Scarlett Strallen is a simply marvelous Eliza, a spitfire-in-the-rough at the start who becomes a spitfire of the sophisticated sort by the end. Jamie Parker, who speaks as much as he sings (for reasons traceable to the history of the casting of the original Broadway production), is all self-involvement and stiff-upper-lip certainty until, at the very end, that lip trembles just a bit in a moderately Shavian manner that keeps the work’s conclusion just ambiguous enough. The other, lesser but still crucial roles are handled with equal aplomb, with Alun Armstrong as Alfred P. Doolittle especially ebullient and thoroughly unashamed even when singing Get Me to the Church on Time – the audible glimmer in his eye bodes well for his future, although not perhaps for the future of his upcoming marriage.
Wilson offers immaculate pacing with a wonderful sense of rhythm and of ensemble, and his management of the orchestra and the very fine two-dozen-singer chorus is exemplary. My Fair Lady is essentially an upbeat show throughout – surely one reason for its enduring popularity, since Shaw’s Pygmalion is decidedly less frothy – and with its serious Shavian underpinnings largely buried beneath bounce and amusement, it succeeds as pure (well, almost pure) entertainment that does not require much audience thought but that provides a wonderful theatrical and musical experience. Wilson’s full engagement with the material makes this recording one to cherish: it is less of an exploration of classism and social mobility than Shaw intended, but every bit the joyful explosion of personality clashes and colorful settings that Lerner and Loewe wanted it to be.
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