Customer Reviews

The Street Where I Live

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This is a witty (if occasionally slaphappy), literate, and very readable (difficult to put down) account of the making of three musicals. I doubt, however, that persons not especially interested in the theatre will want to read this. Note also that this is not a conventional autobiography like, say, Richard Rodgers's "Musical Stages": it concerns the circumstances of the author's life only peripherally.

Also recommended: Craig Zadan's "Sondheim & Company" and, for musicians, Jeff Burns's "Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz Rock Keyboardist".

For anyone who loves Broadway or Hollywood musicals, this book is pure magic. Alan Jay Lerner tells how he came to create his finest works, infusing the text with his signature wit and fascinating insight into human nature. Some of the show business giants of the 50's and 60's make appearances here, and Lerner shares marvelous anecdotes about all of them. MY FAIR LADY, CAMELOT, GIGI -- so many stars, so many songs, so many wonderful stories to tell. The result is a delightfully entertaining read, one that is both funny and filled with the author's love of his life's work.

Alan J. Lerner/and his collaborations with Fritz Lowe and Burton Lane are miracles of the 20th century. The circumstances of their coming together in an artistic and social mileux that called for--no yearned for that kind of musical theater--is a story in itself.

Mr. Lerner talks eloquently about these collaborators-and others (some not so succesful), and gives us complete and insightful discussions about the shows for which he has written the lyrics--"just" productions like "My Fair Lady," "Gigi," "Camelot," and others perhaps not as well known.

Mr. Lerner also discusses his own life with great candor--and even greater wit.

This book is an absolute must-have for those interested in The American Musical Theater! I have given it several times as a gift.

Yeah, well I gave it as a gift once too. Then I read the gift and learned that it wasn't the gift I intended. Sorry if that sounds garbled, but the long and short of it is: this isn't the book Alan Jay Lerner originally published. Much of that (great) book, including some of its very best parts, has been extracted. The thing that really gets me, though, is that this paperback version's inside flap claims it is "unabridged"! HOW can they get away with this?

Unlike many theater or Hollywood figures who write their own life stories, Alan Jay Lerner can actually organize and clearly articulate the events of his life! Even if you are not a lover of the Broadway theater or Hollywood, I recommend that you get the book purely for the pleasure of reading his prose! I have been searching for this book ever since I read a library edition of it years ago. I am more than overjoyed that they have finally reprinted it!

Alan Jay Lerner has written a funny, fascinating, charming memoir of his biggest successes (My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot). Full of insight, wit, and memorable anecdotes, this book is about as close as you can come to recapturing the lost world of Broadway as a place brimming with vitality and talent. You will certainly enjoy it if you care about the subject matter at all.

I'm reading this book, I love it! Because it's easy to read it and enjoyable! If you want to know the three great musical such like: "My Fair Lady" and "Gigi" and "Camelot", you must read this book! I love it!

The words "All at once my heart took flight" from "I Could Have Danced All Night" after he made them so famous; inexplicably considering their rare quality, would still, if he was alive, make Alan Jay Lerner cringe. He surprises us with similar revelations of his own gaucheness in his book. It follows that, while this matchless line was saved, there must have been even more wonderful inspirations that were discarded. "Those little eyes that one day will send you crashing through the ceiling" he was never happy with either.

It began for Lerner: "The twenties. Radio in its infancy. No TV. Motion pictures were still silent. And sixty-three theatres on Broadway. One season there were over thirty musicals running simultaneously, December 1927 eleven shows opened on the same night".

When he was writing "Brigadoon", Lerner was asked by Bobby Lewis, who was being auditioned as its director: "What do you think you have written?" Lerner responds showing his lack of psychoanalytic power. It was a revelation for Lerner to hear: "What you have written is the story of a romantic who is searching, and of a cynic who has given up." This analysis, like a good deal of the psychoanalysis that later he paid highly for, in the days when it was fashionable, freed him from writer's block, whose inevitable return kept him paying for the couch for the rest of his life. "As a rule it is not sadness that brings tears to my eyes, but a longing fulfilled." Both "Brigadoon" and "Camelot" contained miracles in the stories; but as he said: "I do not believe in miracles. I have seen too many".

In a surprisingly detached manner, he reveals that the memory of his passionate love in Sunday School for a little girl was the inspiration for "On the Street Where You Live" that lifted him to describe the towering feeling of walking on air, of being several stories high. Such words, fairy edifices themselves, raise up even those who rarely listen to the words, to walk the soft pavements of the atmosphere.

The butterfly partnership of Lerner, Fritz Loewe (the book is dedicated to him) and Moss Hart was a broken on the treadmill of its own success and thereafter by the same destructive fires of Time that consumed the original Camelot of The Dark Ages. While "Camelot" was being finalised on the road, at the height of the strains, which are relentlessly addressed, Lerner had to be operated on for a stomach ulcer; and on the way out of hospital he saw Moss Hart, who he loved with an awe he often iterates in this book, prone after a heart attack in another bed. Loewe, realised at this point, that they'd gone far enough. During the construction of such castles in the air, the deadly pain of such undertakings was so life threatening Loewe instinctively pulled back and the partnership was broken. The love of music, and the words, the lure of money and women (and, for Loewe, the addiction to gambling) makes this an easy book to read quickly. Its wisdom is worn very lightly. "When something is bad and gets better, one begins to think it is now good, when all it is, is less bad." It is a book that is nostalgic; but which also angrily curses the sixties when the same theatrical feast was spread a little wider for the less privileged bunch who would be called "rock stars". While it settles a few scores with an understated but orchestrated rage, it is the journey of a man looking for wisdom; who after such suffering, is truly qualified to dispense it. "It takes much more work to produce a failure than a success."

Time itself and the bouncing baby boomers of "The Sixties" that Lerner despised so deeply, made up the market force that consumed him. After the war, Americanisation in England was welcomed. It seemed to me as a child that there was nothing else. I never questioned it. It took the arrival of "The Liverpool Sound" for us to reassert ourselves. In 1953 my young father was playing "Rock Around the Clock" loudly as men do when their wives are away. He had a collosal gramophone veneered with walnut; under whose massy lid there was a little brown Bakelite dish for needles. The whole organic ensemble was varnished with that early radio cellulose spray varnish that crumbles under the lightest dint of pressure. The matched veneers around the central main speaker made it look as if the roar of its music came from a map of Africa or a lion. After that fling with Bill Haley, it fell silent for many years. My mother burst in with the shopping fuming "I can hear it at the bus stop!"

The Broadway musicals might have been German songs and philosophy if the other side had won The War. In those cash-strapped days women pushed "Silver Cross" prams with the livery of luxury limousines to shops where assistants served them one by one; offering real string handles on glossy brown carrier bags printed in dark blue with the still lives of fruit. After the arrival of The Beatles, musicals like "My Fair Lady" were passé. Nonetheless, we arrivistes knew that for most of those years "The Sound of Music" was the LP that featured at the heart of the pop charts; and it was denigrated for being there so long. The pull of "My Fair Lady" as a film however, proved so powerful that even with my meagre pocket money I decided to see it for myself and I went alone. The sixties boy who went in whistling "She Loves You" never came out again. The spectacle of the show, the exquisite beauty of Audry Hepburn, was the fantasy of my own mother's gutter where, she recalled, dirty boys sat and spat pomegranate seeds; where it also began for Yeats after all his success: "The rag and bone shop of the heart."

As many reviewers have already said this witty wonderful book is not a traditonal biography and mainly covers the making of 3 musicals. It is page turning enjoyment.

It is what I call a 'happy' book - meaning his writing and descriptions emphasize humor and good nature toward the inevitable set backs, craziness and stress faced in tackling these projects and life in general.

I appreciate this because I find often it is rare in books about creative types who are so often self-destructive. Alan Lerner may or may not have also been self-destructive in real life, I don't know not having read much about him, but his attitude of humor in this book is refreshing and enjoyable.

So if you have read too many books about dark figures bent on self destruction such as Carson McCullers, Dorothy Parker, John Barrymore, the Fitzgeralds, Louise Brooks etc etc then it is nice to have a change of pace.

If you like this, would highly recommend 'Mr Abbott' by George Abbott - also a broadway director, producer and writer and also written in similar style, amusing, instrospective, interesting.

What a wonderful book! Lerner has a great sense of humor that is makes this quite a fun read.