It has always struck me as odd that such a minor character should end up with such a catchy, sweet song. It seems a lot more like the sort of song that would go with a successful romantic plot - but this is probably about half of his screen time. Do we know why they did this? Was it to help mislead the audience into thinking Eliza would marry him? Did they just want to give a showpiece to the actor?
The answer to that—as is the case for all great theatre questions—just may lie in Greek mythology.
In order to dissect that, we need to wear two hats: not just our theatre history hat, but also our dramaturgy hat, where we look at an element of a script and consider its role in the story (how it advances character, themes, etc.), and how the source material and development of the script might inform that element's role. And I've been longing for a chance to incorporate real dramaturgy on AH—even if it's distracting me from doing my actual dramaturg work right now. So let's go!
My Fair Lady is based on the five-act George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion (1913), which tells the story of a Cockney woman named Eliza Doolittle who turns to professor Henry Higgins for lessons on how to speak "proper" English. Instead of paying for lessons, Eliza becomes the subject of a bet between Higgins and his friend Pickering, that in just six months Higgins will be able to teach Eliza how to speak and behave with such etiquette that she'd be indistinguishable from a duchess. Long story short, this works out, but at the end she also gets into a fight with Higgins about how he treats her, and more or less declares that she will not put up with it anymore. Happy end.
The play was very successful across Europe and North America—Shaw apparently noted that a solid chunk of his income came from productions of Pygmalion—but there were a couple controversial parts of the play. One was Eliza scandalously saying the line "Not bloody likely!", but more pertinent to our interests is the ending: a lot of people, both audiences and cast members, thought that Eliza and Higgins should have ended up together, because they wanted the show to have a "happy ending." Shaw was adamantly opposed to this ending, and included an epilogue in the printed version of the script (he calls it a "sequel") explaining why they would never get married, and asserts that the play is supposed to be a Romance, in that Eliza undergoes a transfiguration, not a romance, in that it's a love story. This issue doesn't appear out of nowhere: there is a discussion in the final scene—born more out of anger than love—about how Eliza wouldn't want to marry Higgins, and she mentions that Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who she interacts with briefly earlier in the play, is clearly in love with her; indeed, Eliza and Freddy do marry in Shaw's epilogue.
Shaw worked on the screenplay for the 1938 film adaptation, which replaced a lot of exposition with actual scenes. For example, act 4 takes place shortly after an unseen ball, the climax of the bet where Eliza demonstrates her newfound prowess; the movie actually shows what happens at the ball. Shaw didn't want the movie to concede to demands that Eliza and Higgins end up together, though agreed to soften the ending between them; however, against his wishes a final scene was added where Eliza does return to Higgins.
In the early 1950s (Shaw died in 1950), Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe are chosen to compose a musical based on the play. Many had tried to do this before, but they all struggled. But over the next few years, the creative team worked out writing and casting the show, rehearsing and tryouts, and hit Broadway in 1956. Lerner recalls in his memoir why adapting the show was such a challenge:
There were certain rules for the construction of a musical that the play seemed incapable of obeying. […] what about a secondary love story, a subplot? A proper musical at that time demanded a subplot to provide musical variety. […] Pygmalion, however, had one story and one story only. It was a superb one, but the only one, and any author who thinks he can add characters to a play by Shaw is exhibiting behavioral evidence of the first signs of acute paranoia. Also, Pygmalion, although Shaw called it a romance, is a non-love story. […] However, no matter how the play ended, until the last scene it was most definitely a non-love story and how, may I ask, does one write a non-love song? These were but a few of the stumbling blocks Fritz and I encountered as we worked on it during those summer months.
However, things changed a few years after they first started the project:
By 1954 it no longer seemed essential that a musical have a subplot, nor that there be an ever-present ensemble filling the air with high C’s and flying limbs. In other words, some of the obstacles that had stood in the way of converting Pygmalion into a musical had simply been removed by a changing style. What causes the change? It is not the desires of the audience. It is the restlessness of authors for new forms of expression, which audiences then discover to be exactly what they were unconsciously longing for. […] As Fritz and I talked and talked, we gradually began to realize that the way to convert Pygmalion to a musical did not require the addition of any new characters to give the score the variety usually demanded. There was enough variety in the moods of the characters Shaw had created and we could do Pygmalion simply by doing Pygmalion following the screenplay more than the play and adding the action that took place between the acts of the play.
Apart from a brief encounter at the beginning of the musical, Eliza meets Freddy at a horse race toward the end of Act 1. He is immediately smitten with her, and takes an utter fascination to her mannerisms. At this point she has been training for a few months, and is generally able to pass as proper, despite Higgins's concerns at her behavior. But she falters when, excited by the race, she curses, startling everyone.
Everyone, that is, except lovestruck Freddy, who in the next scene launches into the song in question, "On The Street Where You Live".
In his memoir, Lerner writes that he drew inspiration for the song from how when he was ten, he spent a lot of time on the bench near where a girl he was interested in lived, hoping to catch her coming to or going from home in order for a chance to chat (he later learned he had the wrong address). He also recalls later on that in an early production of the show, no one was moved by "On The Street", and everyone on the creative team but him wanted to cut it; wanting to salvage it, he modified the lyrics to better reflect Freddy's connection to Eliza. Apparently this version demanded an encore the first time it was performed. Early outlines of the show indicate that they were already considering giving the smitten Freddy a song at this part since the beginning, though originally it may have been during the horse race scene and not a new one.
Scholar Dominic McHugh notes that, unlike other main characters, Freddy doesn't undergo any real growth. This seemed to be Lerner's intention: in his memoir, he described one of Freddy's lines as a "flagrantly romantic lyric that kept edging on the absurd exactly right for the character,” and connects Freddy to his personal story at the bench on the grounds that he was 10, which is about Freddy's emotional maturity (despite being around 20). McHugh further finds that, throughout the show's development, Freddy evolved from "a compulsive gambler" into a "faithful but dull lover for Eliza." The ultimate goal here, McHugh wagers, is to make Freddy a foil for Higgins, provoking the question of who (if anyone) she will end up with.
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