Fair Lady Research Articles

Briefs / Feuilletons

Briefs / Feuilletons Jürgen Diet, Massimo Salcito, and Mary Black Junttonen, Columbia University Libraries’ Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) has acquired the archive of “Radio Unnameable’s” host Bob Fass. The archive contains an extensive collection of radio broadcasts, original photographs, and personal correspondence that showcases the impact and ingenuity of Fass’s work in the 1960s and ‘70s. First aired in 1963 on New York’s WBAI, “Radio Unnameable” was a groundbreaking departure in format and philosophy from traditional radio programs: Fass connected ordinary callers with each other as well as with studio guests—cultural icons of the era including Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, and Hunter S. Thompson—in an unscripted fashion that anticipated contemporary social media. Fass earned a reputation as “the midwife at the birth of the counterculture” for his commentary on the culture and turbulent politics of the 1960s and for live coverage of such landmark events as the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Columbia University student protests, and the Tompkins Square Riots. Highlights from the 600,000 minutes of broadcast footage include interviews with Abbie Hoffman, as well as performances by and in-studio visits with Bob Dylan, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Arlo Guthrie. The recordings are relics of an era of widespread change in America, offering unique, in-depth, and unfiltered insight into the ‘60s and ‘70s. Fass’s broadcasts speak to a wide range of scholarly interests, from the relationship between music, art, and activism, to how the counterculture of the ‘60s began to fragment in the face of the identity politics of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Baldwin Wallace University (BW) is proud to announce the acquisition of the private collection of Broadway legend Jack Lee. A BW alumnus from the class of 1951, Jack Lee was among the most prominent conductors and music directors on Broadway. In his long career, Jack worked with such renowned creators as Kander & Ebb, Alan Lerner, and Stephen Sondheim. He led dozens of Broadway and touring productions, including Sweet Charity with Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera, Peter Pan with Sandy Duncan, and My Fair Lady with Richard Chamberlain. Jack was also dedicated to teaching and was a long-time professor and music director at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Over the years, Jack amassed a substantial collection of books, scores, scripts, and other materials, which he willed to his alma mater upon his passing in March 2016. Baldwin Wallace received the collection in April, and the library staff has been working to identify and categorise the materials. Of special interest are unique materials used for performances in Cleveland and on Broadway. These scores include many annotations in various hands regarding music, texts, and staging. The collection also includes what may be the largest compilation of sheet music (and sheet music covers) dedicated to or associated with Madame Lucia Vestris of London stage fame. Currently housed in the archives of Ritter Library, the collection will eventually be located in a dedicated space in the BW Conservatory of Music. Interested parties should contact University Archivist Keith Peppers (kpeppers@bw.edu) or music librarian Paul Cary (pcary@bw.edu). A Protocol between the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (ICCU), IAMLItalia and RISM has been signed. The partners agree to collaborate, through a working group, whose charge is as follows: [End Page 68] • to recognise the importance of their institutional roles in light of the aims of international research about music resources in order to improve worldwide access to updated information about Italian libraries and the resources they preserve; • to exchange knowledge and data about music resources; • consequently, to improve the respective catalogues and their services to users with specific projects which may include: ○ selecting and importing into the SBN catalogue records concerning resources preserved in Italian libraries that are currently available only in the RISM card and electronic catalogues; ○ making bibliographic and authority records that are only in SBN searchable and indexed through the online catalogue of RISM; ○ identifying and solving the issue of duplicate bibliographic records that are in the SBN and RISM databases; ○ implementing searching and enabling rendering of music incipits in the OPAC SBN; ○ aligning, updating and...

Panorama by Rawley Grau

characters or deep, multilayered analysis of its events but rather taking its readers on a long and widespread journey to this faraway time and place. If you approach The Gardens of Consolation with such a mind-set, you are in for a beautiful tour de force of a novel. Raha Namy University of Denver Dušan Šarotar. Panorama. Trans. Rawley Grau. London. Peter Owen / Istros Books. 2016. 200 pages. This deeply engaging work traces the intersection of the narrator—a stand-in for the Slovenian author—with other wandering souls encountered across Europe from the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Notable among these is Gjini, an Albanian whom the narrator meets in two contexts: first as his driver and guide in Galway, then again as a journalist in Ghent. In fact, this “genie” of a companion effectively grants the author further narrative—as a portal into others’ migratory experiences. Brilliantly evocative black-and-white photos by the author trace the text’s moods, showing—among other, perhaps happier scenes of people and buildings beautiful in themselves—also the pocked, eviscerating shoreline, the intransigence of water and floods, walls and crashes, and an ephemeral present, redolent with displacement and statelessness, waiting and mourning. Evocation of these states is this book’s main achievement. The debt to W. G. Sebald—in photos and narrative approach—is acknowledged with an early allusion to Austerlitz. Rather than placing primary importance on who is doing what, the hydraulic ebb and flow of Panorama’s sentence waves subsumes the role of narration. The effect is foregrounded explicitly in the text: “Words were rolling like multicoloured marbles, the glass eyes scurrying away, hiding beneath the table, ducking out of sight for a moment as if waiting for inspiration, then taking off again; I felt that maybe if I could freeze them, at least for a second, could read their placement in the room, I’d be able to capture the thought, the long sentence that was both hiding and revealing itself to me in seemingly random images.” This narrative style is handled adroitly in Rawley Grau’s translation, with a poet’s honed grasp of vowel play, consonance, and the piling of clauses, how these direct the rhythm of our thought and how this rhythm orchestrates our visceral apprehension of something communicated beyond the content of words and scenes. Giving oneself to these meditative rhythms represents the true depth and joy of this novel— and it is a spiritual joy. Indeed, the epigraph of Panorama, from Mark 13:34, captures this dual register: “It is like a man who has left his home and gone on a journey” evokes the migrant’s narrative; yet this biblical verse actually speaks of Jesus leaving the earth, leaving behind his disciples—and by extension, all humanity—to dwell in a state of readiness for his return. This waiting implies stewardship ; it implies responsibility for the earth and its inhabitants while the master of the house is away. Keith Garebian Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady Routledge Critic and essayist Keith Garebian pens this fresh and comprehensive examination of My Fair Lady, the 1956 musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. With the composers, the libretto, the original actors’biographies, and details of the show’s initial run under the microscope, Garebian reanimates one of the great musicals of the twentieth century for twenty-first-century readers. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 75 The Flowering of Modern Chinese Poetry Trans. Herbert Batt & Sheldon Zitner McGill-Queen’s University Press With its lens focused on the period between 1919 and 1949, The Flowering of Modern Chinese Poetry delivers a comprehensive survey of the rise of nontraditional poetry during the Republican period of Chinese history. As many of these poets’legacies have been buried by the Communist era that succeeded them, this volume will introduce major poets to Western readers for the first time, with accompanying biographies to provide context. Although Panorama offers no answers, its dignity and artistry fulfill an implicit contract—that the heightening and condensation which accompany masterful narrative transformation can be part of a process that, somehow, redeems. By participating as readers, the author at least grants us observer...

City Profile: Stratford, Ontario

WORLDLIT.ORG 5 For half the year, the hamlet of Stratford , Ontario—named after the birthplace of William Shakespeare—is much like any other small North American town. But in April, the town’s atmosphere changes overnight. Lifeless buildings are suddenly transformed into theaters, production studios, and rehearsal halls. Through October, the quiet streets are full of cars and buses and the odd carriage ride. And every gift shop within the city limits is packed with tourists hoping to take a little of Shakespeare home with them. Since its start in the summer of 1953, Stratford, Ontario, has become associated with some of the most notable Shakespeare productions in the modern era. Its inaugural performance of Richard III featured the talents of Alec Guinness and Irene Worth. The town’s high standard for actors has continued ever since. Now an internationally recognized event, people come from all over the world to take part in the Stratford Festival. Over the years, the productions in each season have varied—from Shakespeare, old classics, and new plays debuting for the first time—though there is always at least one production of the Bard’s work being performed. The year I attended, not only did I get to see Twelfth Night or What You Will and Richard III but also classic greats such as The Grapes of Wrath and My Fair Lady (with the original Bernard Shaw ending replacing the modified one from the musical adaptation). One of the great things about the city’s productions of Shakespeare are the different ways they reimagine the settings and show how adaptable and relatable the stories are. For instance, Twelfth Night had a new twist: instead of sixteenthcentury Illyria, the sets and costumes were reimagined in a fantastical steampunk style, adding to the light and comedic sense of the play. This year, on the 150th anniversary of Canada’s independence, the festival will be putting on iconic classics such as Guys and Dolls, Treasure Island, and Romeo and Juliet. Stratford isn’t just about its plays, though. During the day the streets are lined with trees, pots overflowing with flowers, and an atmosphere of calm merrymaking by tourists and residents alike. Running around the city is the Avon River, which forms Lake Victoria with its classic Juliett III boat tours. For those wishing to take in the quaint atmosphere, there are also bikes for rent to explore the historic downtown area. When night falls the area becomes deserted, but only because everyone is hitting the local pubs to wind down. The main pub for the actors to hang out in—at least when I was there—was the Boar’s Head. Attached to the Queen’s Inn, the inside of the pub smells like an old library crossed with a 1920s speakeasy: old leather, older wood, musky cigar smoke, and just a touch of the good stuff. It’s a great place to pull up a stool at the bar, try your luck at a game of pool or darts, or find a small booth for reading. Anna Hernandez, a WLT intern, is currently working on her MA in library science at the University of Oklahoma. photo : richard bain Notebook city profile Stratford, Ontario by Anna Hernandez ...

How They Do It Where We From: On Queer Form

How They Do It Where We From:On Queer Form Phillip Brian Harper (bio) Everyone knows that Judith Butler did not conceive Gender Trouble as the founding contribution to queer theory that it almost instantly turned out to be.1 Nevertheless, one of the book's very first scholarly citations implicates it in a formal structure that we can now see as queer in a most fundamental sense. Butler's reference is to Denise Riley's "Am I That Name?"—an investigation into "feminism and the category of 'women' in history" that predated Butler's own book by almost exactly a year, and whose title itself is lifted from Shakespeare's Othello.2 It is a question posed by Desdemona to the scheming Iago, who has just heard from Emilia, Iago's wife and Desdemona's attendant, that Desdemona's husband Othello has deemed Desdemona a whore. Iago—who has of course duped Othello into his mistaken judgment—innocently asks, "What name, fair lady?" to which Desdemona replies, "Such as she says my lord did say I was"—phraseology that in its obliquity, indirection, and recursivity recapitulates at the level of form the very queerness that the play also registers at the level of theme, insofar as it depicts women's classic mediating function in relations between men.3 Inquiring as to whether she "is" a particular designation rather than a particular type of being, Desdemona has already oddly skirted the question of status that is really at issue in Othello's declaration. Here she furthers this project of evasion by disavowing direct knowledge of that declaration itself, casting as uncorroborated report ("she says my lord did say. …") what is in fact her personal experience, inasmuch as Othello has made his accusation right to her face. Such a thwartwise way of proceeding is quint-essentially queer, though it need not be so defensive as it appears in Desdemona's curious speech. On the contrary, it can be an engine of subtle self-assertion, as in the oblique [End Page 259] second-person address characteristic of songs by the English band The xx, whose two lead vocalists superficially seem to be singing to each other but, because they are at once differently-gendered and gay-identified, avow that they are "really singing past each other"; the result is what at least one commentator has characterized as "the tamped-down eroticism" of their duets on such singles as "Crystalised" and "Islands."4 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The xx vocalists Oliver Sim (left) and Romy Madley Croft (right) sing away from each other in the video for "Islands" (dir. Saam Farahmand, 2010). Copyright ©2017 Saam Farahmand. Reprinted by permission. Or even better: on the 2010 release "Something Else," by Diamond Rings, the singer assures the object of his unrequited desire, "I know you know just what you like / And I am really not your thing," before going on to issue the caveat: "But just in case you change your mind / I wrote this song for you to sing."5 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Diamond Rings stares down an elusive object of desire in a publicity still for the single "Something Else" (Secret City Records, 2010). Photo by Jared Raab. Copyright ©2017 by Jared Raab. Reprinted by permission. Why better? Because in mobilizing a circular syntax in order to posit a similarly cyclical reversal of romantic fortune ("I wrote this [very] song for you to sing [back to me]"), these lines not only manifest a queer form but also cunningly refuse the abjection to which their singer might [End Page 260] otherwise be consigned. Which is to say that they deploy form in a classically queer fashion, powerfully reminding us of that crucial practice, and powerfully demonstrating just how it is done. Phillip Brian Harper Ashton Cooper, Brooklyn Phillip Brian Harper PHILLIP BRIAN HARPER is Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of English. A scholar of modern and contemporary U.S. literature and culture, of African American expressive culture, and of gender and sexuality, Harper is...

US-Hungarian Relations Ten Years After 1956

1966, the tenth anniversary of the 1956 Revolution, was a key year in US–Hungarian relations. Diplomatic relations were raised from the lowest to the highest level, but suspicion and tension remained. Neither side knew what to expect from the other on account of the anniversary, the Vietnam War, economic and cultural negotiations, and the fate of Cardinal Mindszenty. A traditional diplomatic historical approach is supplemented here with cultural materials to present the full scale of contacts ranging from high political issues to the visit of Hollywood movie star Kirk Douglas in Budapest. First Secretary of the Legation for Press and Cultural Affairs Edward Alexander receives special attention, because he played a crucial role in the events of 1966. As press secretary, he helped calm Hungarian fears over what American journalists might report about the anniversary, while as cultural affairs officer he worked on documenting and expanding American cultural presence in Hungary. In the latter capacity, he opened the USIA Library at the Legation, fraternized with blacklisted painters of the Zuglói Kör [‘Zugló Circle’], monitored the Hungarian stage production of My Fair Lady, and reported on the publication of American literature in Hungarian.

Theo Bikel (1924–2015)

Theodore Meir “Theo” Bikel was a consummate performer and actor, as well as political activist. Born in Vienna, he fled with his family to Palestine in 1938, where he became an actor in Tel Aviv; he moved to London following the war, where he continued as an actor and also budding folk performer. He learned folk songs while involved with Alan Lomax and the American expatriate leftwing community; he appeared on Lomax’s BBC television series Song Hunter. One British police report noted in early 1954, while keeping watch on both Lomax and Ives: “It has recently been learnt that Burl IVES, the well-known broadcaster of hill-billy music, was first given his chance to broadcast on the American radio by LOMAX who also assisted Josh WHITE another American singer to gain public approval.” The Red Scare was alive and well in Great Britain, although much more muted that in the United States. Bikel moved that year to the United States and quickly plunged into the worlds of Broadway theater and commercial folk music. His New York apartment quickly became a gathering spot for folk musicians, including the Clancy Brothers and Cynthia Gooding. For the rest of his life Bikel juggled his acting and singing careers, with great success in both, while always continuing his progressive politics. His Hollywood career began in 1951 with John Houston’s The African Queen, with Bikel playing a World War I German naval officer, soon followed by Moulin Rouge, The Pride and the Passion, The Enemy Below, The Defiant Ones, and My Fair Lady, to name only a few. On Broadway he began with Tonight in Samarkand, then had a string of hits, including The Sound of Music, for which Rodgers and Hammerstein included “Edelweiss” just for him; he appeared as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof for at least 2,000 performances beginning in 1967. Meanwhile, he appeared in various television productions. He managed to squeeze into this busy schedule dozens of folk-music albums, beginning with An Actor’s Holiday, Folk Songs of Israel, and a Young Man and a Maid with Cynthia Gooding, all for Elektra in 1956. Two years later Songs of a Russian Gypsy appeared, then many more albums for Jac Holzman’s label during the following decade. With his facility for languages, Bikel’s albums added to the numerous international recordings of the 1950s, which deftly countered the Cold War’s suspicion of foreigners. As if his acting and performing careers were not enough, in 1956 Bikel opened two pioneering folk venues in Los Angeles with Herb Cohen. The first, the Unicorn, seating fewer than 100, launched the career of the folk duo Bud and Travis. Soon thereafter Bikel and Cohen opened Cosmo Alley, behind the Ivar Theater in Hollywood, which seated 150 and served beer and wine, and where Maya Angelou

Introduction

Introduction

The Making of Cabaret by Keith Garebian (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of Cabaret by Keith Garebian Valerie Joyce The Making of Cabaret. 2nd ed. By Keith Garebian. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. pp. xiv + 232. $19.95 paper. “Cabaret is not just a musical,” Keith Garebian asserts in the new preface to his second edition of The Making of Cabaret. Rather, he argues, it is “a rare balancing act that is both entertaining and instructive and that manages to make music, dance, dialogue, and décor part of the action rather than restrict them to serving as mere divertissements” (xiv, xi). Garebian’s work on Cabaret, which is part of his larger body of work on groundbreaking musicals such as West Side Story, Gypsy, and My Fair Lady, is also an impressive balancing act of entertainment and instruction as he deftly and deeply explores the historical, artistic, and structural process of creating and producing a groundbreaking musical. [End Page 125] In this new edition, which updates and expands the 1999 original, Garebian has cut “much of the extraneous biographical background on the major collaborators in order to concentrate more sharply on aesthetic and sociocultural issues that did not receive much discussion in the first edition” and has included several images of the most recent revivals (xiv). Garebian begins with “Bowles and Berlin” and “Prince of Broadway,” detailing the origination of the Sally Bowles character and the adaptation process from her inception to her arrival on Broadway. He introduces Christopher Isherwood’s biography and his Berlin Stories, the tales chronicling his experiences in pre-World War II Germany. Garebian then traces John Van Druten’s stage and film adaptations of Isherwood’s character in I Am a Camera, including biographical information on Julie Harris, who starred as Sally Bowles in both versions. The focus of the chapter then shifts to Harold Prince, the innovative director of the 1966 Broadway original production of Cabaret, whose imprimatur, Garebian argues, is indelible. In “Curtain of Light, Tilted Mirror,” and “Cabaret Ambience,” Garebian examines Cabaret’s original production design, with a particularly useful analysis of the political and social milieu of real German cabaret and the ways in which Prince and his team both utilized and missed opportunities to exploit the Brechtian elements available to them in the richness of their Kit Kat Klub setting. Garebian specifically focuses on Boris Aronson and Patricia Zipprodt’s work in sets and costumes and thoroughly examines the production’s “single greatest design element,” the giant mirror that hung over and reflected the audience, which he uses as a metaphor throughout the text (49). After providing thorough biographies of composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, Garebian insightfully analyzes the incorporation and application of a camp aesthetic in their musicals and specifically in the Kit Kat Klub performances of Sally Bowles and the emcee in Cabaret. He also examines each song in the original score, detailing the writing process for each collaborator as well as their decision-making, rehearsal, and revision processes as the musical found its final form. Wading into content that could easily become mind-numbing, Garebian’s work here is balanced by his inclusion both of descriptive passages of character work and plot concerns and of analytical details concerning orchestration and complex rhyme schemes. Throughout The Making of Cabaret, Garebian provides biographical material for the stars of the musical, as well as anecdotes that enhance both the context and interest of the narrative. In “Casting” and “Rehearsals and Boston,” he covers the major players in the original production, Lotte Lenya, Joel Grey, and Jack Gifford, among others. He also provides some of the most comprehensive [End Page 126] research collected on Ron Field, Cabaret’s choreographer in 1966 and 1987. In the chapter “Broadway Presentational,” Garebian provides a balanced assessment of the original production’s achievements and faults, covering both financial details and the reviewers’ responses to the Broadway opening and the cast, with particular attention to the much maligned Jill Haworth as Sally Bowles. Overall, his work on the original production firmly institutes it as a pivotal musical in its historical moment. In “Reincarnations and Revisions” Garebian examines the two major Cabaret reincarnations, the 1972 Bob Fosse film and the...

My Fair Lady: A Voice for Change

<i>My Fair Lady</i>: A Voice for Change

Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical

Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical

Book review: Dominic McHugh, Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady

Book review: <i>Dominic McHugh</i>, Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady

When We Were We

When We Were We Nii Ayikwei Parkes (bio) Kwame utters un-Ghanaian things like “sweet as a chocha” and “my plates are killing me.” They are from a mixed bag of international slang he uses to pepper his conversations. No one is able to place him with ease. Whenever I confront him about his language, he says, “I’m a Ghanaian so everything I say is fucking Ghanaian,” and I say, “See what I mean? You can’t say the f-word casually like that. My mother would slap you. Your own mother would slap you.” “Well, we are not going to see them, are we?” He holds my gaze. Last week, I told him I’ve been thinking of going home. I’m tired of cold London mornings; of sweeping streets from 5am, having to negotiate with tramps who call me f-ing immigrant or nigger as I collect empty beer cans around them; then the lifting and shifting job—where Harry compliments me on my English and says, “I’m not being funny, yeah, but do you have a big dick?”—until 2pm; four hours sleep, then cooking, eating, and studying for a degree I already have under a different name; and a short nap before the shelf-stacking gig from 1-4am. “Really?” he said, and went back to playing that FIFA football game on his Playstation. Kwame, unlike me, has decided not to study. He met a girl who worked at a market research call center while clubbing in Essex. Three days later, he left our shelf-stacking job at Iceland to go and work at the call center. He is a shift manager now. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays—days when I don’t do lifting and shifting—I come in at 7:30am to change for uni and find him still sleeping beneath the large map of Zimbabwe that graces the wall of his day bedroom. He seems content with life. We are not the kind of Africans who cross the Sahara and traverse an ocean in some tricky vessel to get to Europe. We are too well educated for that, but we know several Sahara-crossing Africans. One of our friends, Manu, from Benin, came to the United Kingdom from Italy, complete with Sicilian gestures, fleeing—he claims—a family whose daughter he impregnated. He met her in a club where he worked at the bar and did security on weekends. We met him at our local pub, The Duke of Wellington. When we ask if the family is a Mafia family he says he doesn’t think so. He insists he is a responsible Muslim man so he sends money for the child by Western Union; the money is collected on the Piazza Vittorio Veneto on the fifth day of every month, without fail. “The boy is also called Vittorio,” he informs us with a smile. Manu is in London with no problems because he has an Italian passport, but we still have problems. Kwame and I knew exactly where we wanted to go when we decided to leave Ghana. From what we had been told, what we had read in the brochures at the British Council, from what we could glean from films, London was occasionally rough (Lock, Stock and [End Page 1107] Two Smoking Barrels), but nevertheless a place of unbelievable opportunity (My Fair Lady, Love Actually). We spoke the language, we worked hard, we had good degrees, so that’s where we were going. When we were refused visas the first time and the British High Commission kept our money, we were bitter for weeks, months, until our friend Hakeem said, “Why are you worried? Just get new passports and apply again. Learn from your mistakes. A birth certificate costs about nothing to get.” He was right. Any details changed on a birth certificate make you a new person. Kwame applied for a one-year visa although he only had an interview for a Masters in Psychology. Naive. I didn’t have enough money in my account to prove that I could fend for myself over my proposed six-week holiday. I calculated my costs based on Naked. It...

А. Блок: Вечная женственность после похорон Прекрасной Дамы

The article is dedicated to the ideas of Eros and Femininity of poet Alexander Blok. The central place in the work is given to the problem of ontological status of Blok’s Fair Lady. The authors show that the poet has been looking for ontological place of Femininity in nature, society and universe on the whole for a long period of time. As a result, Blok finds the true kingdom of Fair Lady in time and in history.

Shavian Elements in the My Fair Lady Film

It seems temporally appropriate that George Cukor’s screen version of My Fair Lady should have been released in 1964, since it neatly concluded a half-century of attempts by actors, directors, and adapters alike to romanticize Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. From the very moment, in fact, that Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Mrs. Patrick (Stella) Campbell—in their respective roles of phonetician Henry Higgins and Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle—had improvised lines and stage business to imply to their opening-night London audience in 1914 that a romantic union between their two characters was inevitable, Shaw was embroiled in a perpetual struggle to control his conception of the play. To Shaw, the culminating point of Pygmalion was that Eliza achieves independence from the bullying Higgins. an Eliza-Higgins marriage, he declared, would have been “a revolting tragedy.”1 To that end, Shaw appended a prose sequel to the first (1916) English-language publication of Pygmalion in book form, in which he outlined Eliza’s married life with the youthful Freddy Eynsford Hill, a minor character in the play. However, the public, in general, “went on preferring its own version.”2 The advent of talking pictures offered Shaw an opportunity to reassert his wishes, and to this end he wrote his own screenplay adaptation in 1934 for the first ( German) film version of Pygmalion (Erich Engel, 1935), making it a contractual requirement that the filmmakers adhered to his (translated) scenario, in which any suggestion of a Higgins-Eliza romance had been carefully removed. Without having seen the resulting film, Shaw also granted screen adaptation rights on the same condition to Dutchand English-language productions (Pygmalion, Ludwig

A Country Bumpkin in Cosmopolitan Shanghai

A Country Bumpkin in Cosmopolitan Shanghai

Authorship and Shaw's Shakes Versus Shav

Authorship and Shaw's <i>Shakes Versus Shav</i>

Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady. DominicMcHugh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 288 pp. $25.00 cloth.

<i>Loverly: The Life and Times of</i> My Fair Lady. DominicMcHugh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 288 pp. $25.00 cloth.

Transatlantic Translations and Transactions: Lars Schmidt and the Implementation of Postwar American Theatre in Europe

Contributing to an intercultural understanding of American and European theatre during the postwar era, this essay explores the significance of the Swedish publisher and producer Lars Schmidt for the introduction and spread of US plays and musicals on his side of the Atlantic. Schmidt’s innovative publishing strategies and production methods, in addition to his skills as a cultural translator, made works like The Glass Menagerie , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , and My Fair Lady commercially viable and intelligible to audiences in various national contexts. In the process, he was largely responsible for the emergence of the individual producer in Europe, a position that was perceived as foreign and, at times, vehemently dismissed as too commercial and too American.

Loverly: the life and times of My fair lady

Loverly: the life and times of My fair lady

To Broadway, To Life: The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick (review)

To Broadway, To Life: The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick. By Philip Lambert. (Broadway Legacies.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. [xvi, 361 p. ISBN 9780195390070. $35]. Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, appendices, index. This recent installment in Oxford's Broad way Legacies series (six volumes at last count) has taken over some of the territory formerly covered by the Yale Broadway Masters series. The latter produced eight volumes between 2004 and 2011 (with something of a hiatus recently) that focused primarily on the most successful and prolific composers and lyricists from Broadway history. The Legacies series has a broader sweep, with volumes on creators (Dorothy Fields and the volume under discussion, on the team of Bock and Harnick) as well as on individual works (Show Boat and South Pacific, with a projected volume on My Fair Lady). With few exceptions, volumes in both series come from authors who specialize in musical theatre or the specific musicals themselves, lending both series a strong imprimatur; these are foundational texts and often the first full-length studies of their subjects, written by the top experts in the field. As such, volumes in this series typically survey the important biographical and musical elements of the composer's and lyricist's styles, present in-depth studies of some of their more famous musicals, and introduce readers to lesser-known works in their repertoires. Indeed, the trajectory of volumes in both series serves as a kind of canon-building ex ercise, in which the major works in the repertoire are shored up by scholarship that also allows for new works to be introduced into that canon. A corollary to this scholarship is the series of concerts that has taken place in New York since the mid-1990s. This series presents in a concert setting rarely-heard or lessfrequently- produced musicals to allow audiences access to some of the treasures of the Broadway repertoire without the burden of their production costs. Lesser-known works like St. Louis Woman (Arlen and Mercer) stand along more famous works like On the Town (Bernstein and Comden/Green) and these pared-down revivals provide an alternative to the often commercial and ephemeral offerings on Broadway today while allowing a glimpse into the past. For Bock and Harnick, the subject of the present volume, the series editor Geoffrey Block mentions specifically the Encores! presentation of She Loves Me and the performance of Kirsten Chenoweth as an indication that a study of the creators is timely and their works worthy of revisiting. Philip Lambert, the author of the volume itself, situates his subjects not only within their own oeuvre, but within Broadway history in general, which is another important function of books such as these. The output of Bock and Harnick falls into one of the most interesting and fraught periods in musical theatre historiography, the end of the Golden Age and the ascendancy of the concept musical and the directorchoreographer. As such, the author can provide commentary on the period and the way in which changes in the creative process reflect some of the changing means of production and focus of Broadway musicals. Lambert particularly wants to portray the team as adhering to the highest ideals of what is called the musical (a term that has been applied to many of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, but which is fraught with modernist ideology and indeed has been applied to many works before and after the Golden Age heyday). His emphasis is, then, on how the authors valued dramatic integrity over sheer craftsmanship: If there is a thread of consistency in their mature work it is their acute sensitivity to drama; they wrote for specific dramatic circumstances and characters, in the best tradition of the integrated musical. They also created little musical dramas within the substance of their scores-dramas of themes, motives, chord types, harmonic progressions, and the like, that interact artfully with the unfolding developments of story and character. …