Impact case study database
Shaping the public experience of Lerner and Loewe’s work through rediscovered sources and newly edited materials
1. Summary of the impact
McHugh’s work on the musicals of Lerner and Loewe takes many forms; these include explorations of their sources and critical reception, and scholarly editions of the musicals, as well as biographical studies. Together, this work has allowed a range of stakeholders the chance to re-evaluate and to unpack the work itself, in new and distinctive ways. McHugh’s insights from Lerner’s papers have enabled both public and professional audiences to reconsider the works of Lerner and Loewe in their most authentic form and in the process establish them as one of the most influential creative duos ever to have worked on Broadway.
2. Underpinning research
Broadway musical librettist and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner is best known for his two most popular collaborations with the composer Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady and Camelot. But his other fifteen musicals have been mostly or totally neglected and Lerner and Loewe have received considerably less attention than figures such as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bernstein, and Sondheim. Building on his first monograph (R1), McHugh has expanded academic and public engagement with, and understanding of, Lerner’s prolific career, including the works he wrote with composers other than Loewe (e.g. Bernstein). McHugh’s work has brought to light long-overlooked archival material - partly by helping to process/catalogue Lerner’s papers at the Library of Congress - and placed it in new critical frameworks, situating him as the world’s leading expert on Lerner. His research into Lerner’s musicals (also including Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, and Lolita, My Love) has given rise to three books (R1, R2, R3) published by OUP (with over 4,000 combined sales), the scholarly editing of two scores (R4, R5), productions, concert performances, and numerous other public engagement activities.
In these outputs, McHugh has investigated Lerner and Loewe’s creative processes (R1, R3, R6), presented a new account of Lerner’s biography (R2), and written about the reception of his musicals. Media coverage ( The Stage, Playbill) of A Lyricist’s Letters (R2) highlighted McHugh’s discovery that Lerner was forced to withdraw from collaborating on Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, among many other newly uncovered biographical facts. Building on this, McHugh’s Complete Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner (R3) provided a new reference text for practitioners and scholars to interrogate Lerner’s writing and the different directions that his musicals took before reaching the stage or screen. Dozens of Lerner’s songs were published for the first time in this book, and it also represented the first scholarly edition of any Broadway writer’s lyrics (a new model for research).
Through these publications (R1-R6), McHugh has also presented previously overlooked/unknown sources (including music and lyrics) to a range of scholarly, professional, and public audiences. The prominence of these invitations reflects the esteem in which his work is held. For example, he delivered the prestigious American Musicological Society’s Fall 2016 Library of Congress Lecture, on Lerner and Loewe’s creative process, and was profiled as a researcher in leading theatre magazine The Stage to mark Lerner’s centenary year of 2018. He also appeared as an expert panellist in conversation with actor Kevin Kline at Lincoln Center (2018) and delivered insight events at the National Theatre (2016), the Sydney Opera House (2016) and the New York Public Library (2018). As well as his appearances as an expert talking head on various programmes, McHugh’s research itself has been covered widely in the international media, including on BBC Radio 3, 4 and 5, The Sunday Times and National Public Radio (NPR, USA). This has led to performances of music (including a complete musical) that had not been heard in decades and advisory work to major professional productions, commanding considerable public interest.
3. References to the research
McHugh, D. (2012) Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199827305. Available on request from HEI.
McHugh, D. (2014) Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199949274. Available on request from HEI.
McHugh, D. and Asch, A. (2018) The Complete Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190646738. Available on request from HEI.
Loewe: The Day Before Spring. Piano-conductor score. ed. D. McHugh. Completed 2016. Available on request from HEI.
Loewe: My Fair Lady. Full score. ed. D. McHugh. First version completed December 2017 and used in preparation for the Lincoln Center revival. Available on request from HEI.
McHugh, D. (2015). “I’ll Never Know Exactly Who Did What”: Broadway Composers as Musical Collaborators. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 68(3), 605–652. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.3.605
4. Details of the impact
McHugh’s research has shaped productions of Lerner’s musicals in Australia, the UK, and the US. Exploiting his archival research for (R1), in May 2015 McHugh curated, produced, and presented a concert of previously unheard music from My Fair Lady that had been cut from the musical before its opening night on Broadway in 1956. The concert of world premieres was performed by students at the University of Sheffield as part of the Festival of Arts and Humanities. The sold-out event attracted the attention of the international media including The Sunday Times, with excerpts heard on Radio 4’s Today programme, Radio 2 and 3, and NPR in America [S1].
The 2016 revival of My Fair Lady at the Sydney Opera House was a revival of the original 1956 Broadway staging and McHugh was invited to share his research with the production team, who had heard about the 2015 Sheffield concert in the international media. Musical Director of the Sydney production Guy Simpson explained “ McHugh ‘gave us the confidence to [go back to the original scores], as it was clear from [his] research that the 1956 version was fresher than the rental scores usually available...his research was invaluable to us making this decision” [S2]. Director Julie Andrews recalled that a car had been intended to be used in 1956, but was cut before opening. McHugh provided an inventory of the scenery for the original production to support this memory and the car was reinstated [S2]. Authenticity was at the heart of the production’s marketing strategy and it became the fastest-selling, most profitable production in the history of the Opera House [S3]. Guy Simpson commented “ Without having Dominic on board as musicological consultant we would have been forced to rely on published work...His knowledge and experience of the score, and of the development of the more recent iterations of the score, meant that our production was fresh and authentic” [S2].
In 2016, McHugh collaborated with the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. to process Lerner’s papers. They had long been unavailable to researchers and practitioners. Senior Music Librarian Mark Eden Horowitz commented: “ Dominic’s efforts related directly to a production of an obscure Lerner show, Lolita, My Love at the York Theatre in New York. This input helps us achieve our aims of both making our existing collections more usable and accessible and helping us grow our collections in the most meaningful ways we can” [S4].
In May 2017, McHugh produced the first fully-orchestrated production of the previously unpublished Lerner and Loewe musical The Day Before Spring since 1953, using his new edition (R4) and with new orchestrations by his PhD student Matthew Malone. The production was given a half-hour feature on Radio 3’s In Tune, and was featured on Radio 4’s 6 o’clock news and in The Sunday Times. This led to the ‘newly-restored’ show being acquired by Music Theatre International (MTI) and made available for hire for the first time [S5].
McHugh’s published volume of Lerner’s lyrics (R3) also became an important source for the Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2018 revival of Lerner’s On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965). Describing McHugh’s work as ‘extraordinary’, Charlotte Moore, Artist Director of the Irish Rep and director/adaptor of this production, remarked: “ I was able to immediately gain insight into [Lerner’s] work and technique which made translation into our production fun and a joy. The research covering the period from 1934 to 1985 could never have been accomplished by myself and my crew no matter how devoted we were to authenticity and history” [S6]. Star of the production Melissa Errico explained that (R3) “ had a significant influence on [her] interpretation,’ which was ‘stronger and more authentic as a result” [S7].
McHugh also prepared the first scholarly edition of My Fair Lady (R5) which supported Lincoln Center’s production of the musical on Broadway. The edition presented materials including original orchestrations and unheard passages of underscoring, and was used “ to determine whether the show’s creators and their colleagues made changes after the Broadway premiere that should be incorporated […] or not” (Musical Director, Ted Sperling) [S8]. Sperling wrote to McHugh because he needed more music in one of the sequences: “ I asked, ‘Is there any cut material from the ball I should look at?’ He sent me boatloads of material, including ‘The Pygmalion Waltz,’ which is an earlier version of ‘The Embassy Waltz.’...We decided to use it in a place other than in the main ball. And in the ball itself, you may notice that in the underscoring there’s music you’ve never heard before” [S8]. The production was marketed using this musical connection to the original Broadway orchestrations [S9].
As well as enabling audiences to see more authentic versions of Lerner and Loewe’s work in production, McHugh’s research and expertise has supported organisations and broadcasters to widen access, both by advising on content and as an expert broadcaster.
In 2019, McHugh was asked to advise the Great American Songbook Foundation in Indiana about choosing content for their annual exhibition. McHugh suggested the overall theme that they used (politics in American musicals) and the Foundation’s archivist commented: “Dominic recommended [Lerner’s] musicals, including 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Camelot , that we incorporated into the finished product. He served as our first subject advisor, working with us on interpretation [and] historical accuracy” [S10].
In 2020, McHugh was invited to select material for and appear in an episode of the Radio 4 series Tales from the Stave addressing My Fair Lady. Based on (R1), (R5) and (R6), McHugh’s involvement solved a knowledge deficit in the show’s producer Tom Alban who was used to working with single volume classical manuscripts, rather than the 30 boxes relating to My Fair Lady. “ Dominic’s research expertise and familiarity with the material meant that he was able to select appropriate content and the shape of the final programme, with its focus on the different arrangers and orchestrators who created the final score with the composer, was directly led by these choices” [S11].
5. Sources to corroborate the impact
Example media coverage of The Lost Songs of My Fair Lady, demonstrating reach.
Testimonial: Musical Director of the Sydney Opera House/Opera Australia production of My Fair Lady, 2016-17.
Sydney Morning Herald, “There’s no accounting for taste as My Fair Lady tops Opera House sales”, October 6, 2016.
Testimonial: Senior Music Librarian at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA.
Press coverage of the launch of The Day Before Spring as a rental property draws attention to the ‘newly restored early work’ a week after the Sheffield premiere (May 2017).
Testimonial: Artistic Director of the Irish Repertory Theatre, New York, and adaptor/director of their production of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 2018.
Testimonial from Tony Award-nominated actress Melissa Errico, star of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever at the Irish Repertory Theatre, New York, 2018.
Confirmation from Musical Director of My Fair Lady on the use of research in My Fair Lady Broadway production, Lincoln Centre Theatre, New York, 2018-19.
Promotional materials for the Lincoln Center My Fair Lady.
Testimonial from the Archivist at the Great American Songbook Foundation, who oversaw the creation of the Foundation’s exhibition Of Thee I Sing, 2019-21.
Testimonial from BBC producer, Tales from the Stave: My Fair Lady, 2020 .
Additional contextual information
Grant funding
| Grant number | Value of grant |
|---|---|
| SG121678 | £9,959 |