Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist's Letters by Dominic McHugh Read Free Book Online

beginning and, as I wrote you not long ago, would always be your show as much as mine.
             Anything you’ve heard to the contrary please ignore. There’s obviously a malicious little gremlin loose in the theater.
             See you tomorrow.
    As always,
    Alan
         In spite of Lerner’s efforts to ensure a smooth transition into the new cast,
Paint Your Wagon
only ran until July 19. Then the writers took the opportunity to revise the piece for the national tour. Looking back over the creative process in December 1952, Lerner explained in
Theatre Arts
that his vision had taken a long time to come into focus:
         I started
Paint Your Wagon
in 1947. I began thinking about it the month after
Brigadoon
opened.
Brigadoon
was my first real success. I discovered after it opened that I was guilty of the success illusion just like anyone else. You somehow expect your emotional tensions of the past to disappear overnight. Well, it just doesn’t work that way. Realizing this, I decided to write about it, and that’s how
Paint Your Wagon
started. My original thought was of the first scene. I visualized two wagons: one going
hopefully
to the gold country, and the other coming back in
despair
. I guess this more or less symbolically represented the reaching for and achieving of personal success. I wanted to tell the story of these two wagons and what lay between their coming and going. Actually, asthings developed, I finally decided to write the life and death of a ghost town, and to do it in a serious tone.
             I did enormous research. It may be that I did too much for the play’s good. I think that I became so impassioned with realistic values that I forgot that musical theater is not really interested in that kind of truth. I realize now that I was trying to write what the British call a
gutsy
musical: a lusty, bawdy reproduction of an era. I even tried to write realistic, non-theatrical lyrics.
             The reason for so many changes [to the score] was that as we rehearsed each scene in Philadelphia, the show was fine. But when we put all the scenes together, the show fell apart. From the third week of rehearsals to the third week out of town, we were still making changes. Most of the work was done in Boston—two weeks before coming to New York.
             One of the problems was a confusion of style. The scenery and the dancing matched; they were both done impressionistically. The music and the book also matched, but they were done realistically. This conflict hurt the unity of the show.
             Looking back, I realize that the play got watered down by compromise after compromise.…I talked to a lot of people about the show, and I listened to their criticisms. Finally, I sat down and rewrote it. The really important thing is that my original intentions for the show are still valid and worthwhile. I believe in an honest reproduction of life on the musical stage. I believe in the
gutsy
musical I tried to do. What’s more, I believe that musical theatre has to welcome that kind of treatment of earthy people. 156
    But even the revised touring version folded quickly, and
Wagon
never quite repeated the success of
Brigadoon
. Curiously, the London production (1953: 477 performances) ran longer than its Broadway incarnation (289 performances), suggesting that perhaps the exoticism of the Wild West was more appealing to a British audience. Then again, it hardly mattered any more.
Brigadoon
hinted at what was to come from the Lerner and Loewe team, and
Love Life
was among the most ambitious musicals Broadway had yet seen. With the appearance of
An American in Paris, Royal Wedding
, and
Paint Your Wagon
in quick succession, Lerner was now a force to be reckoned with.
----
         1 Frederick Loewe (1901–88) was the composer of most of Lerner’s greatest successes, including
Brigadoon
(1947),
Paint Your Wagon
(1951),
My Fair Lady
(1956),
Gigi
(1958),