Based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady has that crackling dialogue, those sweeping melodies from Frederick Loewe, and the echoes of Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in every lyric. And on the whole, the lyrics they got to sing are expert. But I have a bone to pick with Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist: he's just not British. I listened to the London cast recording that Harrison/Andrews made and wondered just how the Brits reacted to their language being American-ized unwittingly.
Why Can't The English?
By right she should be taken out and hung
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue!
Just you wait, Henry Higgins. The irony is that Lerner murders the English tongue right here. She should be hanged with a noose, not hung like laundry.
Oh, why can't the English learn to
Set a good example to people whose English
Is painful to your tears?
It works when set to music; nevertheless, there are three "to"s here. And there's so much going on: are the "people" also English? "You" is the English people, suddenly in second person?
I'm An Ordinary Man
I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling
Than to ever let a woman in my life
Just like good deeds, one "as" deserves another. A "more than" comparison might have served our expert grammarian better.
I'm a very gentle man...
Who has the milk of human kindness
By the quart in every vein
People knew this even before Pulp Fiction: Europe's got the metric system!
On the Street Where You Live
The whole song, really. Freddy's a lightweight, but I reckon he still knows that in England, one is in a street, not on it.
You Did It
Higgins: "Thank heavens for Zoltan Karpathy. If it hadn't been for him, I'd have died of boredom. He was there, alright, and up to his old tricks."
Mrs. Pearce: "Karpathy? That dreadful Hungarian. Was he there?"
Higgins: "Yes."
There's no grammatical jumble here. Mrs. Pearce just sounds like she has a hearing problem. This exchange is captured for posterity on the original Broadway and London cast recordings, but was fixed for the film.
Show Me
Don't talk of June, don't talk of fall,
Don't talk at all -- show me!
The English prefer "autumn." Lerner actually revised these for the London recording in 1959. But when the 1964 film rolled around, "fall" returned to its post. Perhaps he thought the Brits wouldn't watch because of Audrey Hepburn. The revised London lyrics (on all counts an improvement):
Please don't implore, beg, or beseech,
Don't make a speech -- show me!
Get Me To The Church On Time
Drug me or jail me,
Stamp me or mail me
We can see the problem here. The film executives couldn't; they kept the Broadway lyric. My question is, wouldn't Stanley Holloway, or Julie Andrews in the example above, have mentioned that they as Brits find these lyrics odd? The revised, London-only lyrics:
Drug me or jail me,
Bond me or bail me
A Hymn to Him
The real lyric: What in all of heaven could've prompted her to go?
Rex Harrison reads it as "What in all in heaven" on both the Broadway and London albums. Quit, Professor Higgins. Maybe the grammar slips had vexed so much by this point that he'd grown accustomed to them.
This has been an update of Musical Theater Is An Important Art Form. Time for a PBS pledge break!
4 comments:
I was soooo obsessed with the movie in high school and yet I still barely noticed any of these little mistakes (though obviously a lot of these are in the play). What brought on this rant?
It's not a rant... I love My Fair Lady, but it is funny how many of these things pop up.
I just went through and corrected three typos on my own blog post. I hope they didn't cause you too much pain. ;-)
That's what I get for not proofreading...
Also, Candace and I have been singing a lot of My Fair Lady this weekend, so your post is a bit of an amusing coincidence.
Um.. Josh... I think you might have too much time on your hands.
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