Constructing Camelot: Britain and the New World Musical

Abstract

The critical and cultural rhetoric around the Broadway musical often insists upon the form's fundamental ‘Americanness'. This language celebrates the musical's ability to encapsulate the spirit and character of a self-consciously modern America, liberated from its European legacy. Despite this acclaimed liberation, the integrated Broadway musical is often characterized by a dialogue between ideas of American identity and assumptions about European cultural accomplishment. Thus, we see a number of Broadway musicals that consciously re-write canonical literary and cultural texts – Kiss Me, Kate, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Candide, Carmen Jones, Rent, Aida. This article explores the implications of this critical rhetoric, and the extent to which it is reflected in the later works of Lerner and Loewe. Both My Fair Lady and Camelot engage with a notion of Britishness that is cultural as much as it is historical. The creation and reception of Camelot in particular has related that engagement specifically to an idea of contemporary America. This America is epitomized both by ‘its art’, defined as the ‘populist’ musical with attendant social values, and its potential to produce both a culture and society to rival that of the Old World. Such engagements signal the extent to which the Broadway musical strives to be validated both by and against the ‘high art’ apparently epitomized by British cultural accomplishment.

Notes

1. Carey Wall, ‘There's No Business Like Show Business: A Speculative Reading of the Broadway Musical’, in Approaches to the American Musical, ed. by Robert Lawson-Peebles (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), pp. 24–43 (p. 28).

2. Earl F. Bargainnier, ‘Introduction: In-Depth, The American Musical’, Journal of Popular Culture, 12 (Winter 1978), 401–06 (p. 404).

3. Irving Berlin's artistic achievement was to be ‘Everyman for the average American’. Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), p. 7.

4. Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 8.

5. Peter H. Riddle, The American Musical: History and Development (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 2004), pp. 37–38.

6. Ibid., p. 41.

9. Grant, The Rise and Fall, p. 5.

7. When Dizikes contends that there is no difference between a musical and an opera, he suggests that the term ‘opera’ would have tied Americans too closely to ‘the European past’. In contrast, the term ‘musical’ is ‘unpretentious, vague enough to include anything’. John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 502.

8. Alan J. Lerner, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration (London: William Collins, 1986), p. 140.

10. Julian Mates, America's Musical Stage: Two Hundred Years of Musical Theatre (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 7.

11. Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 30.

12. Lerner, The Musical Theatre, p. 25.

13. Lerner, The Street, p. 17.

14. Ibid., p. 55.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., p. 121.

17. Ibid., p. 128.

18. Shaw won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for the film in 1938.

19. Even the score's references to popular traditions are given a European context: the Argentinian tango is associated with Spain in ‘Rain in Spain’, for example; and ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ references the English music-hall tradition.

20. Lerner, The Street, p. 49.

21. Ibid.

22. Lerner, The Musical Theatre, p. 25.

23. Ibid.

24. In his Preface to Camelot, Lerner excoriates playwrights who ‘go soul-searchingly and snootily on, writing and performing for audiences they basically despise, furious at them for not being entertained by what is not entertaining’. See Alan Jay Lerner, Camelot: A New Musical (New York: Random House, 1961), p. xii. For Lerner, ‘the great plays of history have usually been splendidly constructed, most often with whopping good parts, and both author and audience have gone home quite contented’ (Ibid., p. xi). ‘A musical play is a popular art form. I do not believe there is such a thing as an avant-garde musical: it is a contradiction in terms' (Lerner, The Street, p. 135).

25. Lerner's memoirs detail his strong adherence to the original set-pieces in the original play. The only notable deviation between play and musical is in the somewhat controversial ending. This ending, however, so often attributed to Lerner and Loewe, has its origins in Shaw's screenplay for Pygmalion.

26. Lerner, Camelot, pp. 35–36.

27. Quoted in Gene Lees, The Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 177.

28. Lerner, The Street, p. 231.

29. Ibid., p. 195.

30. Ibid., p. 192.

31. The Sword in the Stone (1938); The Queen of Air and Darkness (originally published separately as The Witch in the Wood, 1939); The Ill-Made Knight (1940); and The Candle in the Wind (1958) (London: Collins).

32. Lerner, The Street, p. 188.

33. Lerner, Camelot, p. 6.

34. T. H. White, The Once and Future King (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1958), p. 481.

35. White, The Once and Future King, p. 426.

36. Ibid., p. 521.

37. Ibid., p. 416.

38. Lerner, Camelot, p. 9.

39. Ibid., p. 94.

40. Ibid., pp. 21–22.

41. Ibid., p. 7.

42. Ibid., p. 52.

44. Ibid., pp. 353–54.

43. White, The Once and Future King, p. 324.

45. Ibid., p. 624.

48. Ibid., p. 29.

46. Lerner, Camelot, p. 50.

47. Ibid., p. 114.

49. Malory appears as a young boy in the final scene, as a quiet observer of the conflict and destruction.

50. Lerner, Camelot, p. 14.

51. Ibid., p. 114.

52. Ibid., p. 111.

53. See, for example, commentaries on the show such as Anon., ‘The Road’, Time Magazine, 14 November 1960 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,711968-10,00.html) [accessed 22 October 2008].

54. Quoted in Lerner, The Street, p. 250.

55. Ibid., p. 252.

56. Ethan Mordden, Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 32.

57. Lerner, The Street, p. 129.

58. Ibid.