Learning About Lerner

Finally finished Fi-n-ish-ing-the-Hat by Big Steve.

The best bits are the concise and sharp criticisms of some of the Great Broadway Lyricists. These, I suppose, are the “heresies” trailed in the title. Well, maybe you have to be a Broadway insider but they don’t seem that heretical to me: Gershwin over-rhymed; Hart was lazily inconsistent; Berlin, well-crafted but banal. Nothing too surprising there, I would have thought.
Except for Alan Jay Lerner.

Here Sondheim is unusually cryptic. He describes My Fair Lady as “one of his most entertaining nights in the theatre”. And yet is not particularly enamoured by the lyrics.

Yet Lerner has always struck me as the most polished of the Broadway writers. His lyrics, always singable and often elegant, sound as if they’ve been buffed to a high shine. In thinking this I admit that I’m probably as influenced by anecdotes as by the lyrics themselves. My favourite story is how he once locked himself in a hotel room for two weeks trying to come up with an alternative to one couplet from Gigi:

“Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
Some day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling”

What’s wrong with the couplet? Well, should the mood take you, you would “crash” through a floor but more likely “fall” through a ceiling. But then, as well as gaining a few broken limbs, you’d also lose the internal rhyme (flash/crash). So Lerner spent two weeks holed up in a hotel room expending his nervous energy (he wore gloves whilst writing to stop him biting his fingernails) trying desperately to come up with something better. In the end he gave up and kept the lines as they were.

But that’s why I like Lerner; his lyrics (like Sondheim’s) are highly crafted.

So it’s surprising when Sondheim points out this bit of clumsiness in “I will Never Let a Woman in My Life”:

“I’d be equally as willing
For a dentist to be drilling
Than to ever let a woman in my life”

I never even noticed it before. Clearly I need to pay more attention. It’s a real grammatical pile-up, a convoluted way of saying “I’d rather go to the dentist than...”. (In addition I suspect that “drilling” really requires an object otherwise the implication is that you’re getting drilled by the dentist; very different indeed). This may seem nitpicky but remember who’s singing it. It wouldn’t matter if the character were a simple, uneducated “flahwer” girl who washed her face ‘n’ ‘ands before she come, she did. But it’s supposed to be a professor of English, one of the foremost linguistic experts in the world. The inelegant phrasing is uncharacteristic. Of Lerner too, for that matter.

Another one picked up by Sondheim is from “On the Street Where You Live”. The false rhyme:

“People stop and stare, they don’t bother me
For there’s nowhere else on earth that I would rather be”

Now I concede the dentist drilling but here I rush to Lerner’s defence. I’ve always thought that this was deliberate. Posh young Freddy has fallen head over heels for Eliza. But it’s not a grounded romance; it’s youthful and head-over-heels-y (“And oh, the towering feeling...the overpowering feeling”). I think Lerner’s indicating this by using that false rhyme. It’s letting the audience know in a very subtle and unobtrusive way that Eliza and Freddy aren’t quite the real deal; that the relationship we really should be paying attention to is Eliza and grumpy Higgins.

Or it could be that Alan Jay Lerner just ran out of fingernails.