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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.
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