My Fair Lady

[poliphilo]

I wish I liked Rogers and Hammerstein more. Oscar Hammerstein was obviously such a nice man. But it's the music- it's so smooth and sweet. Listening to one of their scores is like bathing in milk chocolate.

So if I can't take R&H, how am I to explain my love of My Fair Lady? Maybe it's just an Audrey Hepburn thing.

Audrey Hepburn + Rex Harrison + Stanley Holloway + Cecil Beaton + George Bernard Shaw. OK, the songs are chocolately, but it's bitter chocolate. One thing you don't get in Hammerstein's work is wit.

Comments

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

The movie is okay. I don't care for Audrey Hepburn...since she didn't do her own singing, I don't know why they couldn't have substituted Julie Andrews' voice - she was, after all the BROADWAY Eliza.

I guess a lot of the reason Oscar Hammerstein's music was so popular was exactly the reason you say - considering the time in history that it really was at its most popular. Escapism, maybe?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The R & H shows aren't really escapist. Carousel deals with wife abuse, South Pacific takes a brave, liberal line on inter-racial relationships . Hammerstein had a real social conscience. What he lacked, I think, is any kind of edge, any sense of ambiguity. He's so brightly optimistic about human nature.

And the music is so smooth....

As for Audrey- I just think she was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

[ad-lumen.livejournal.com]

I've always thought Rogers was much better when paired with Hart. There is a satirical edge to those scores that seems to have been smoothed away in the Hammerstein shows.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I guess that's the difference between Hart and Hammerstein, the one a wry (and tortured) cynic, the other a big old softy.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

As for Audrey- I just think she was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

She was in Robin and Marian, right? I liked her in that movie, thought she aged well.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, that's a favourite of mine. And I don't think Sean Connery has ever been better.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Sean Connery.

(sigh)

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

That's really part of what I like about R&H is that sort of sunny optimism juxtaposed with fairly deep and sometimes violent social issues. I think it's an interesting dichotomy to say the least, like singing a song about suicide as if it were bubble gum pop.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The present trend is for cobbling musicals together from pop songs. There's been an Abba musical and a Rod Stewart musical and a Queen musical and I understand a Lennon musoical is in the offing. It doesn't bode well for the genre.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean.

And I am trying to like them....