The collaborative team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe
dominated the Broadway stage and American musical theater from 1947 into the 1960s and
their musicals – Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot – still live on in revival
performances and in their movie versions. Lerner was the playwright and lyricist, while Loewe composed
the music. Alan Jay Lerner was born on August 31, 1918, one of three
sons of Joseph Lerner, the founder of Lerner Stores, Inc.
He had a good education, which took him to Harvard, and he studied at the
Juilliard School of Music during his vacations from Harvard. He had done sketches and
lyrics for two Harvard Hasty Pudding shows. He
graduated Harvard in 1940 and wrote advertising copy and scripts for such radio shows as
the Philco Hall of Fame. “Fritz” Loewe was older, having been born on June
10, 1904, in Vienna, Austria, the son of Edmund Loewe, a well-known operetta tenor. (Operetta, best known for the works by Gilbert
& Sullivan, was the forerunner of American musicals.) A precocious youth, Loewe was
playing piano at 4 and had by 9 composed the tunes for a music hall sketch with which his
father toured Europe. At 15 he had a hit
song with “Katrina,” which sold three million copies in Europe. In 1924 he came with his father to America, but
his initial engagements at New York’s Town Hall and the Rivoli Theatre did not lead
to follow-up bookings. The following decade
saw him struggling with a variety of jobs, from cafeteria busboy to boxing, gold mining,
cowpunching, and riding instructor. But in
1935 his song, “Love Tiptoes Through My Heart,” was used in the musical Petticoat Fever. Emboldened, he presented his own musical, Salute to Spring, in St. Louis in 1937. In 1938 his
Great Lady got to Broadway, but had only 20
performances. The two met by chance at the Lambs Club in New York City in
1942. And began to make history. Their first collaboration was Life of the Party, in 1942 – an adaptation of
Barry Conner’s farce, The Patsy – for
a Detroit stock company. It ran for nine
weeks, and they followed it with a musical comedy, What’s
Up?, which ran for 63 performances on Broadway in 1943.
In 1945 they did The Day Before Spring. But these were just warm-ups for what was to come. On March 13, 1947 the curtain went up for the
first time on Brigadoon. This one was a solid hit. Based on Germelshausen,
by Friedrich Gerstacker, it concerns a mysterious, now Scottish, town which reappears to
the outside world for only one day each century. The original production at the Ziegfield
Theatre ran for 581 performances, and led to the 1954 movie adaptation, which featured
Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse and Van Johnson. The
New York Drama Critics Circle voted it the “best musical” the year it opened and
it has been revived frequently over the years. During the next few years Lerner was busy, writing Love Life, with music by Kurt Weill, which was
selected one of the best plays of the 1948-49 Broadway season. And he wrote the story, screenplay and lyrics for
the film Royal Wedding, and the story and
screenplay for An American in Paris, winning him
an Oscar in 1951. He also did the story,
screenplay and lyrics for the movie version of Brigadoon. In 1951 Lerner & Loewe were back on Broadway with Paint Your Wagon, which opened at the Shubert
Theatre on November 12th. It had a
respectable run of 289 performances, and was made into the 1969 film which featured Clint
Eastwood, Lee Marvin and Jean Seberg. Then came My Fair Lady.
This was one of the biggest and most spectacular successes in American theater. The musical opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre
on March 15, 1956. It broke all existing
world records, playing 2,717 performances over a period of more than nine years. Oddly, Lerner & Loewe got a shot at
doing this adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1914 play, Pygmalion, only after Noel Coward and Rodgers &
Hammerstein had passed it up. Rex Harrison
and Julie Andrews starred on Broadway, but when the 1964 movie was made Andrews was
rejected by the movie’s producers in favor of Audrey Hepburn, while Harrison kept his
role. The team collaborated on the film, Gigi, based on the novel by Colette, released in
1958. When first announced, the project was seen by some as a transparent attempt to
repeat the team’s success with My Fair Lady
– which, for contractual reasons, could not be filmed for years yet. Such doubts were dispelled when the film was
released, and it subsequently won the Oscar for best picture of 1958. (A stage version of Gigi was mounted in 1973.) Lerner & Loewe’s last Broadway hit was Camelot, which opened at the Majestic Theatre on
December 3, 1960 and ran for 873 performances. In
many minds it will always be linked with the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose brief
time in the White House has been compared with and likened to Camelot. The
movie version was released in 1967. Loewe
suffered a heart attack in 1958 and after Camelot
went into retirement. Lerner said in a tribute to Loewe, “There will never be
another Fritz. Writing will never again be as
much fun. A collaboration as intense as ours
inescapably had to be complex. But I loved
him more than I understood or misunderstood him, and I know he loved me more than he
understood or misunderstood me.” Alan Jay Lerner died June 14, 1986. Frederick Loewe died February 14, 1988. A vast amount of memorabilia, theater programs, sheet music, posters, etc. exists from Lerner & Loewe’s Broadway hits and their subsequent movies. A quick search of eBay turned up only 18 items related to Brigadoon, but 167 items related to My Fair Lady and 186 items related to Camelot, with prices ranging from a few dollars to over one hundred dollars for rarer items. Original cast albums and movie soundtrack albums are also available.
|
